The Las Cruces City Council approved revisions to two city ordinances that address panhandling and appears likely to repeal two others.
LAS CRUCES - The city of Las Cruces seems headed in the direction of significantly reducing its restrictions on panhandling.
The Las Cruces City Council on Monday approved revisions to two city ordinances that addressed panhandling. In both cases, the revisions removed any reference to solicitation, the term city ordinances use to refer to panhandling.
Two other ordinances that address panhandling remain on the books, including the one that includes the broadest prohibitions against panhandling.
But City Attorney Jennifer-Vega Brown, in a surprise statement on Monday, said that if the two changes made on Monday have their desired effect that she will likely recommend that the other two ordinances be repealed.
The charges are being made in response to a recent Supreme Court decision that said cities cannot restrict the content of speech. That ruling has been interpreted to protect panhandling because is it a form of speech.
The Supreme Court in 2015 ruled that a sign ordinance in Gilbert, Arizona, violated the First Amendment because it limited the content of speech by imposing greater restrictions on signs posted by a church group than other kinds of signs.
The American Civil Liberties Union has used the Gilbert decision to challenge anti-panhandling ordinances across the country. Las Cruces was one of 10 cities targeted in August by the ACLU of New Mexico because they had anti-panhandling laws that the group claimed was unconstitutional. The town of Mesilla was also on the list.
The City Council in October imposed a moratorium on enforcement of three ordinances that addressed panhandling while they were revised. At the time, Vega-Brown said she thought it would be easy to revise the language in the ordinances without changing their intent.
"It's not going to be difficult language to change," she said.
The ordinance changes made on Monday and Vega-Brown's statement about repeal of the other two ordinances were a surprise because they seemed to represent a change in posture from her earlier statements.
One ordinance revised on Monday, one of the three the city had stopped enforcing, had restricted "solicitation on or near a street or highway." It was revised to prohibit "standing or loitering" on or near a street or highway, including traffic medians.
The two ordinances still in force are more explicitly about panhandling and so would be more difficult to revise while retaining their purpose.
One prohibits solicitation "in an aggressive manner," on public transportation or at bus stops, within 15 feet of a bank or ATM, on private property, and from an occupant of a motor vehicle. The other ordinance defines the terms used in two other panhandling ordinances.
Vega-Brown said that she wants to wait six months to a year to see the impact of Monday's ordinance revisions before deciding for certain about the other two ordinances.
The City Council approved the two revised ordinances by a 4-3 margin. Councilors Jack Eakman, Gregory Smith, Gill Sorg, and Mayor Miyagishima voted in favor of the changes.