Last week the St. Petersburg City Council passed a law that bans exchanging money on some of the city's busiest streets. It was strongly encouraged by members of the downtown St. Pete business community, and strongly opposed by advocates for the homeless (among others), who say it penalizes the underclass, since the bill seems in many ways to target newspaper "hawkers".
The City has contended that there are safety issues at play as well, but critics say it's just another law that has led to the contention by the National Coalition of the Homeless that St. Pete is one of the "meanest" cities in the country for the homeless.
But there's something else going on here: The St. Petersburg Times earlier this week filed a lawsuit trying to block the law from being implemented, as they have contended that it violates the paper's constitutional right to free speech (and Media General, the parent company of the Tampa Tribune, later filed a brief supporting the Times). Both in Tampa and in St. Pete, motorists on Sundays can drive up to numerous street corners and have citizens try to sell copies of the local papers to them, which are sometimes the only source of income for some of these hawkers (as we learned while doing research on the in Tampa last month for our current story on the homeless).
But U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara said Thursday that the city has the right to protest pedestrians and motorists, and refused to block the enactment of the law, which will take affect this Sunday.
An interesting sidelight of this issue has been at least a few members of the St. Pete business community expressing outrage at the hometown newspaper for challenging the ordinance.
Here are just a few letters that were sent to Times Publisher Paul Tash earlier this week:
