Plan To Regulate Parades Suffocating

When he first saw it last week, Spokane County Commissioner John Roskelley described a proposed county parade ordinance as “a little bit much.”

That’s charitable.

If Roskelley and his colleagues were to adopt the proposal as submitted to them by Sheriff Mark Sterk, it is hard to imagine how any organized group movement could occur along any public thoroughfare in the county without falling under the ordinance’s provisions.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The proposal does exempt wedding and funeral processions, children walking to and from school or participating in supervised school activities, and government agencies doing their jobs.

The need to specify such exemptions, however, merely underscores how all-embracing and cumbersome the proposed language is. Judge for yourself:

“`Parade’ means any parade, march, ceremony, show, exhibit, pageant, picketing, or procession of any kind, with or without animals, or any similar display, proceeding on foot or otherwise, in or upon any street, sidewalk, highway, road, thoroughfare, alley, park or other outdoor places owned or under control of the county which acts in some way to impede, affect or interfere with the free and unobstructed flow of pedestrian or vehicular traffic, or use by other citizens.”

Organizers would have to wade through an eight-page application form that must be notarized and submitted to the sheriff’s office between 60 and 90 days before the event - no sooner, no later. The applicant would have to secure liability insurance for at least $1 million - $2 million if vehicles were involved.

The applicant would have to pay an estimated $30 to $50 for processing of the permit, plus, under certain conditions, hire off-duty deputies or other security officers.

If any other parade, bicycle event or running event has a permit for the same day, the application would be turned down. Fourth of July parades could not be held in Mead and the Spokane Valley on the same day - legally, at least.

No wonder the proposal struck Roskelley as onerous.

Sterk concedes some of the restrictions go beyond what he believes the lieutenants who researched the issue had in mind. The proposal certainly seems to go well beyond what the sheriff himself says he wants, namely a reliable means of working with event sponsors to make sure public safety is protected.

Sterk’s deputies have more than 1,500 miles of road to patrol. They’re spread thin. Naturally, the sheriff wants enough advance information to plan for special staffing needs.

But the sheriff’s convenience must be balanced against the public’s ability to engage as freely as possible in reasonable and traditional expressions of civic life, whether it’s a church youth group’s bicycle outing or a neighborhood protest of a zoning decision.

Sterk says the proposed ordinance is just an example of what the county might adopt. He and commissioners will talk about it on June 29.

If commissioners do adopt a parade ordinance they should come up with something closer to the streamlined concept Commissioner Phil Harris articulated last week:

“For an event involving more than a dozen people on public property, maybe the sheriff is notified.”