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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

House candidate joins free speech suit

Betsy Z. Russell Staff writer

BOISE – First District congressional candidate Naomi Preston has joined a lawsuit against a huge, city-owned public event center in Nampa, charging the center violated her First Amendment rights by restricting her from campaigning there.

“As a candidate with significantly less name recognition than the Republican incumbent, U.S. Rep. Butch Otter, one of my primary campaign strategies is to make personal contact with as many 1st District voters as possible prior to the Nov. 2, 2004, general election,” Preston said in court documents. “To that end, I have been traveling throughout the 1st District, especially targeting events attended by large numbers of potential voters.”

That’s what she was doing in July when Preston and two campaign volunteers spent an hour one evening distributing campaign literature to people arriving at the Snake River Stampede, a major rodeo held each year at the Idaho Center. But when she returned the next night, security officers ordered her to one of two “free speech zones,” which were 7-by-7-foot roped-off areas in one of the center’s parking lots.

“It wasn’t anywhere where people walked by,” Preston said Thursday. “It’s at the core of campaigning: You should be able to talk to people and offer them a brochure and say, ‘Hi, I’m Naomi Preston, I’m running for Congress.’ That’s what free speech is all about.”

The Idaho Center already had been sued in federal court by volunteers who attempted to gather signatures there for an initiative to repeal Idaho’s right-to-work law and were arrested for trespassing. On July 3, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued a preliminary injunction against the center, ordering it to refrain “from restricting plaintiffs from distributing literature or soliciting signatures on the pathways, grounds and sidewalks of the Idaho Center.”

The judge’s order did, however, allow the center to “impose reasonable time, place and manner restrictions.”

The center had argued in court documents that the people and organizations who lease the center for events are the ones who determine what activities are allowed, not the center itself. They also argued that the “commercial nature of the Idaho Center is not compatible” with signature-gathering or other political activity, and that the center is not a public forum. But the judge disagreed.

The center, built with public funds by the Nampa Urban Renewal Agency, was designed to “be used by and enjoyed by all citizens of (the) community,” according to court documents.

Preston said in an affidavit that the security guards told her, “Judge Winmill approved these free speech zones, so that’s the law now.”

Alan Herzfeld, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho who is handling the case on behalf of the signature-gatherers and Preston, said, “She did not believe, nor do we, that that was a reasonable restriction under the First Amendment, nor consistent with the judge’s order.”

The Idaho Center is surrounded by large parking lots. People who park in one lot don’t generally walk through another; they just walk straight in to the event center in the middle.

“Very few of them would actually pass by the free speech zone that had been set up,” Herzfeld said. “So by doing that, the individuals are being restricted to a fraction of the people whom they’re out there trying to contact.”

Guy Hallam, attorney for the Idaho Center, couldn’t be reached for comment late Thursday. Nor could Otter’s campaign.

Preston, a Democrat, said she talked to and distributed campaign brochures to more than 50 people who were headed in to the rodeo. “I would say 99.9 percent of the interaction was really positive,” she said. “People were very receptive. And I didn’t feel like it was any intrusion on their rights, either.”