Opinion ID: 203074
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Traffic Control Fee

Text: Plaintiffs contend, as the district court held, that even under the intermediate scrutiny afforded content-neutral time-place-manner regulations, the fee provision of the parade ordinance is unconstitutional. Section 13-5(e) provides, The cost of the permit shall be one hundred dollars ($100), plus the costs of traffic control per city collective bargaining agreement and clean up costs, as estimated by the Police Department. The ordinance further provides, The permit fee will not include the cost of police protection for public safety. The $100 fee is payable at the time the application is submitted and the balance at the time the permit is issued. The district court held that the fee provision delegated overly broad discretion to the Augusta Police Department to determine the costs of traffic control  costs which plaintiffs were required to pay as a part of the total parade permit fee. Citing Forsyth, 505 U.S. at 132-34, 112 S.Ct. 2395, the court ruled that the fee provisions of the parade ordinance were lacking in narrow, objective and definite standards sufficient to guide the discretion of the Augusta Police Department in estimating the costs of traffic control. Sullivan II, 406 F.Supp.2d at 116. The district court refused to consider as supplementing the ordinance's own standards an affidavit from Deputy Chief Major Gregoire in which he stated certain of the factors on which he based his calculation of the traffic control fee. Id. at 116-17. The district court ruled that the factors set forth in Gregoire's affidavit went beyond anything found in the text of the ordinance itself and were not shown to reflect the City's well-established practice, citing City of Lakewood v. Plain Dealer Pub. Co., 486 U.S. 750, 770, 108 S.Ct. 2138, 100 L.Ed.2d 771 (1988). Id. at 117. The district court also found that the City charged Mr. Sullivan $478.55 more than its actual overtime payments to the officers who served on the detail assigned to Sullivan's March 20, 2004 parade. This overcharge resulted from the fact that the City estimated how many officers would be needed for traffic control, and what they would be paid, before it knew which particular officers would be available for the parade detail. Id. at 121-22. The City's collective bargaining agreement requires paying each officer for a minimum overtime shift of four hours, but the pay rate of individual officers differs. In the present case, the original estimate exceeded by $478.55 the cost of paying the officers who took part in the March 20, 2004 parade detail. Sullivan paid the original estimate, and no refund was tendered. The district court rejected the City's argument that the pay overcharge was offset by the City's not charging Sullivan for certain of its administrative expenses, such as Gregoire's own time to schedule and organize the parade detail. There was no evidence in the record as to the latter costs. Pointing to precedent that only a fee defraying actual expenses is permissible, and that excess fees are unconstitutional, the district court held that the fee was overbroad as it does not bear a direct or precise relationship to the actual costs incurred. Id. at 122. Plaintiffs complained below, as they do now, that the Police Department's determination of the estimated cost of traffic control relies heavily on a judgment call about the number of officers that are required to provide traffic control because the department has never established any written criteria or formula for calculating the number of officers or vehicles as part of its estimate of the traffic control cost. They argue this broad subjectivity and discretion was highlighted by the police department's increase of its estimate by twenty percent, from eight to ten, for the number of police officers needed to provide traffic control for the parade route used on April 8, 2003 when the same exact route was proposed for the March 20, 2004 parade. They additionally argue that the provision's excessive discretion and overbreadth are demonstrated by the fact the City overcharged them for the actual cost of the additional officers during the March 2004 parade organized by Sullivan.
We disagree with the district court and appellees that the parade ordinance fee provisions lack sufficiently precise and definite standards to guide the police. We agree, however, that the permit fee charged to and paid for by Sullivan for the March 20, 2004 parade, which the court found was incorrectly inflated by nearly $500, was, to that extent, unconstitutional as applied. In deciding that the fee provision in the parade ordinance granted constitutionally excessive or unfettered discretion to the Augusta Police, the district court relied particularly upon the Supreme Court's holding in Forsyth, 505 U.S. at 137, 112 S.Ct. 2395. In that case, a county ordinance mandated permits for private demonstrations and other uses of public property, required advance payment of a daily fee of no more than $1,000, and empowered the county administrator to adjust the amount to be paid in order to meet the expense incident to the administration of the Ordinance and to the maintenance of public order. Id. at 123, 112 S.Ct. 2395. The Court found the ordinance unconstitutional, noting, inter alia, (1) the county administrator's unfettered discretion to determine what expenses to include and to set the amount of the fee, [9] and (2) the fact that the ordinance allowed the fee to include the costs of necessary and reasonable protection of persons participating in or observing said . . . activities. Id. at 133, 112 S.Ct. 2395. The Court held the latter costs were an improper charge upon the permittee, equating it with basing a fee on the content of the speech. Id. at 133-36, 112 S.Ct. 2395. [10] While Forsyth stands as a clear warning against vesting governmental officials with excessive discretion in regard to fee-setting, [11] and while even content-neutral time, place and manner restrictions can be applied in such a manner as to stifle free expression, Thomas, 534 U.S. at 323, 122 S.Ct. 775, the range of fee-setting discretion granted to the county administrator in Forsyth far exceeded that granted here to the Augusta Police Chief and Police Department. In Forsyth, unlike here, the county administrator was not limited to estimating, as part of the fee, a particular category of expenses within the administrator's expertise, like the costs of traffic control. Instead he had discretion to decide the kind and amount of administrative and policing expenses to include (or exclude) from the fee, and it appears that he also assumed the right to charge nominal or no fees to favored groups. Forsyth, 505 U.S. at 131-32 & n. 9, 112 S.Ct. 2395. The fee-setting authority of the Augusta Police Department is far more confined here. The ordinance provides, The costs of the permit shall be one hundred dollars ($100) plus the costs of traffic control per city collective bargaining agreement and clean-up (emphasis supplied). The Police are given no discretionary authority to estimate and charge costs other than the costs of traffic control and clean-up, nor are they authorized to vary the character of the costs as between applicants: the cost of each permit shall be as described, resulting in a uniformly-computed fee for each applicant. The cost of hiring police officers for traffic control is per city collective bargaining agreement, requiring reference to that agreement for the amount to be paid to each officer. Finally, the cost of police protection for public safety, the item the Supreme Court found to be improperly included in the Forsyth County ordinance, is expressly excluded by the parade ordinance from the costs passed on to permit applicants. Given the above limitations, the principal area left to police discretion in estimating the Augusta permit costs lies in determining the number of extra officers and police vehicles to assign to a particular parade or march for traffic control purposes. Plaintiffs complain the City has failed to articulate a precise formula to guide the police in performing this estimate. However, the plaintiffs have pointed to no evidence that there exists any meaningful advance formula that could be inserted in an ordinance to determine the number of needed officers and vehicles in a given case. Parades and marches obviously vary enormously in terms of size, timing, duration and location, resulting often in quite different traffic control needs. Experienced, professional judgment would seem to be the most likely way to estimate how many extra officers will be needed. The City states that the present marches involved the use of very heavily trafficked streets, requiring diversion of traffic elsewhere during the event. It is hard to see any purely mechanical means for determining how many officers would be needed to direct traffic at the various intersections of differing routes and neighborhoods. In any case, plaintiffs have offered no example of the sort of formula they have in mind. In the circumstances, it seems reasonable for the City to rely upon the experienced judgment of its Police Department to determine personnel and police vehicular needs for traffic control at a particular applicant's parade or march. We take judicial notice that traffic control is a major responsibility of local police departments around the nation. Rerouting and directing traffic around construction sites, accident scenes and the like are tasks the police regularly perform. The police, moreover, know the traffic patterns and problems along the different streets in their particular city and its neighborhoods. Augusta could reasonably believe that its Police Chief and his staff had the expertise to estimate, case by case, the additional personnel and equipment needs for a traffic control detail established to handle traffic problems caused by a march on city streets. And once these needs are ascertained, the City's collective bargaining agreement provides objective pay information for determining overall costs. In ruling that the ordinance provided insufficient standards, the district court refused to take into account Gregoire's affidavit that in determining the detail needed for plaintiffs' marches, he was guided by certain implementing criteria criteria not unlike those a police officer said he considered for similar purposes in Stonewall Union v. City of Columbus, 931 F.2d 1130, 1135 (6th Cir.1991). Speaking about the costs charged to plaintiffs, Gregoire stated that the size of the traffic control detail is based only on factors which are completely unrelated to the message to be communicated by marchers and includes the route to be taken, the duration of the route, the estimated number of people who will attend, whether marchers intend to close the entire road or only one direction of travel, and whether there are any other events or special circumstances within the City which could affect traffic. We need not decide if Gregoire's affidavit should have been given weight here. Regardless, it is difficult to see that his stated criteria added much of constitutional import to what can be gleaned from the terms of the ordinance itself. See supra. An ordinance of this type must furnish narrowly drawn, reasonable and definite standards that are reasonably specific and objective, and do not leave the decision `to the whim of the administrator.' Thomas, 534 U.S. at 324, 122 S.Ct. 775 (quoting Forsyth County, 505 U.S. at 133, 112 S.Ct. 2395). We believe Augusta's ordinance furnished such standards quite apart from the matters Gregoire mentioned. The parade ordinance directed the Police Department to calculate the costs of traffic control and clean up relative to the particular event for which a permit was sought. The making of a relevant professional judgment of this kind may properly be delegated to police and other officials. See Kinton, 284 F.3d at 26 (noting that [p]ublic safety and convenience are paradigmatically permissible considerations in the issuance of permits and judgments about public safety are inherently within the competence of permitting officials). The factors Gregoire listed in his affidavit for determining the size of the traffic control detail  the parade route, its duration, the estimated number of people who will attend, whether entire or partial road closure is involved, and whether there are other events or special circumstances affecting traffic  added few if any considerations that would not seem perfectly obvious to anyone asked to determine traffic control costs relative to a particular parade or march on city streets. And, as previously noted, the ordinance itself rules out charges that might be said to relate to the message to be communicated by the marchers by excluding altogether from the permit fee the cost of police protection for public safety. To be sure, the ordinance is terse; more extended glosses provided by written standing orders and the like might arguably be helpful in some way. But we believe the parade ordinance's fee provision affords, by itself, sufficient narrowly drawn, reasonable and definite standards so that the fee-setting decision is not left to the whim of the administrator. Thomas, 534 U.S. at 324, 122 S.Ct. 775 (quotation omitted). Our duty is not to determine whether the ordinance meets ideal standards but whether it passes the constitutional threshold. Plaintiffs, in addition to challenging the wording of the ordinance on its face for alleged absence of fee-setting standards, challenged the fee charged to Sullivan as being constitutionally excessive as applied. The district court agreed. Here, we believe, both appellants and the court are on firm ground. The district court found that Augusta charged Sullivan $478.55 more than the City's actual overtime payments to its officers for the March 20, 2004 march. The City's defense on appeal (apart from arguing the overcharge was so small as to be de minimis) is that it was offset by other expenses not charged plaintiffs by the City, such as the cost of Gregoire's time in processing Sullivan's permit application. The City, however, never purported to include this latter type of expenses in its calculation of traffic control costs. There is, moreover, no evidence to show what such other costs were. We agree with the district court that it was too late in the day for these supposed costs to be plugged into the present fee equation. A mistaken calculation of nearly $500 cannot in this context be considered de minimis. Sullivan's overcharge was contrary to the ordinance's language limiting the fee to $100 plus the costs of traffic control per city collective bargaining agreement and clean up (emphasis supplied). [12] Amounts estimated in advance but never actually charged to the City are not a part of the costs of traffic control. The Supreme Court has held that a government cannot profit from imposing licensing or permit fees on the exercise of a First Amendment right. Murdock v. Pennsylvania, 319 U.S. 105, 113-14, 63 S.Ct. 870, 87 L.Ed. 1292 (1993). Only fees that cover the administrative expenses of the permit or license are permissible. Cox, 312 U.S. at 577, 61 S.Ct. 762 (approving of a fee limited to the purpose stated of meeting the expense incident to the administration of the Act and to the maintenance of public order in the matter licensed); Citizens Action Group v. Powers, 723 F.2d 1050, 1056 (2d Cir.1983) (Licensing fees used to defray administrative expenses are permissible, but only to the extent necessary for that purpose.); Fernandes v. Limmer, 663 F.2d 619, 633 (5th Cir.1981) (invaliding a $6 per day fee for permit to distribute religious literature in a municipal airport because of failure to restrict use of fee receipts to expenses of licensing process). It is a violation of the First Amendment to have charged Sullivan more than the actual administrative expenses of the license, as set forth in the ordinance. Thus, although we find the standards for the permit fee to be sufficiently definite to pass constitutional muster, we uphold the district court's invalidation, as applied, of the excessive amount charged to Sullivan.
The plaintiffs argued successfully below that the parade ordinance's requirement that applicants apply for a permit [n]o less than thirty (30) days prior to an intended parade, march or other use of public ways within the City, coupled with authorization to the City Manager to allow a shorter time frame for good cause shown is not narrowly tailored and vests too broad discretion in City officials. We agree. Notice periods restrict spontaneous free expression and assembly rights safeguarded in the First Amendment. People may, in some cases, wish to engage in street marches in quick response to topical events. While even in such time-sensitive situations, a municipality may require some short period of advance notice so as to allow it time to take measures to provide for necessary traffic control and other aspects of public safety, the period can be no longer than necessary to meet the City's urgent and essential needs of this type. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm. v. City of Dearborn, 418 F.3d 600, 605 (6th Cir.2005) (Any notice period is a substantial inhibition on speech.). Advance notice requirements that have been upheld by courts have most generally been of less than a week. See, e.g., A Quaker Action Group v. Morton, 516 F.2d 717, 735 (D.C.Cir.1975) (two-day advance notice requirement is reasonable for use of National Park areas in District of Columbia for public gatherings); Powe v. Miles, 407 F.2d 73, 84 (2d Cir.1968) (two-day advance notice requirement for parade is reasonable); Progressive Labor Party v. Lloyd, 487 F.Supp. 1054, 1059 (D.Mass.1980) (three-day advance filing requirement for parade permit approved in context of broader challenge); Jackson v. Dobbs, 329 F.Supp. 287, 292 (N.D.Ga.1970) (marchers must obtain permit by 4 p.m. on day before the march), aff'd, 442 F.2d 928 (5th Cir.1971). Lengthy advance filing requirements for parade permits, such as the present thirty days, have been struck down as violative of the First Amendment. See American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 418 F.3d at 605-07 (holding that provision requiring thirty days' notice is overbroad and is not saved by an unwritten policy of waiving the provision); NAACP, Western Region v. City of Richmond, 743 F.2d 1346, 1357 (9th Cir.1984) ([A]ll available precedent suggests that a 20-day advance notice requirement is overbroad.). Even five days has been held too long in certain circumstances. See Douglas v. Brownell, 88 F.3d 1511, 1523-24 (8th Cir.1996) (city's asserted goals of protecting pedestrian and vehicular traffic and minimizing inconvenience to the public does not justify five-day advance filing requirement for any parade, defined as ten or more persons). The City argues that its interest in having advance notice of a parade in order to control traffic, prevent scheduling conflicts, ensure adequate facilities are available, and assign personnel to safely close the streets is narrowly tailored. The City points out that its police force is relatively small, with only thirty-four officers available for assignment to parade details. [13] But while those factors are entitled to due weight, applicants' First Amendment rights have countervailing strength, and these require the City in time sensitive situations to accommodate proposed parades and marches much more quickly than within thirty days. See Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. City of Gary, 334 F.3d 676, 682 (7th Cir. 2003) (noting the reasonableness in general of requiring that a permit to hold a demonstration on city streets or other public property be sought in advance of the event, but observing that the length of the required period of advance notice is critical to its reasonableness; and given . . . that political demonstrations are often engendered by topical events, a very long period of advance notice with no exception for spontaneous demonstrations unreasonably limits free speech (emphasis supplied)). Hence, while practical considerations, such as the scheduling of additional needed officers, will justify a short period of advance notice, a blanket rule requiring the permit application to be made in all cases no fewer than thirty days prior to an intended parade, march, or other use of public ways is not narrowly tailored and so violates the First Amendment. While the above is clear, the City contends that its thirty-day rule is not blanket and that it has made a sufficient exception for the kind of spontaneous demonstrations mentioned above, as [t]he City Manager may allow a shorter time frame for good cause shown  (emphasis supplied). The district court and plaintiffs, however, insist that the good cause standard is too vague and subjective to serve as a sufficient guide to the City Manager's discretion, and that the exception is, therefore, inadequate to establish the constitutionality of the advance notice requirement. We think the exception does not save the unduly lengthy application period. If the good cause exception were attached to a reasonably short application period, we might rule otherwise. But as a device to cure a standard requirement of some thirty days, it is inadequate, requiring, as it does, that all persons desiring to seek a parade permit within some entitled shorter period shoulder the burden of convincing the City Manager of the existence of good cause. Such a requirement curtails an applicant's free speech rights, both because of the additional effort the applicant need make in order to claim those rights and the risk that the City Manager may not realize from the phrase good cause that many applicants will be entitled, routinely, to a shortening of the period. It is true that Gregoire, in a supplemental affidavit, stated, [a]s long as the Police Department is physically able to contact the officers and make the appropriate arrangements to close the road and have the appropriate traffic officers on duty, the City would not deny the permit based on the timing of the application. But the district court supportably ruled that Gregoire's supplemental statement is not shown to constitute a binding administrative interpretation or evince well-established practice. [14] We affirm the district court's conclusion that the present thirty-day time period, as drafted, is unconstitutional for the reasons we have stated.
The plaintiffs argued below that the parade ordinance's requirement that [w]ithin ten (10) days of applying for the permit, as a condition to its issuance, the applicant must meet with the Police Chief to discuss and attempt to agree on the details of the route and other logistics, is not narrowly tailored to serve significant governmental interests because (1) forcing an in-person meeting with the police chief within ten days from applying for the permit creates an unreasonable time barrier that burdens unnecessarily a citizen seeking to promote a spontaneous or prompt demonstration in response to a time-sensitive issue or event; and (2) the details of the route may be an important part of the applicant's expressive activity and thus the applicant should not be required to negotiate with the government about the manner of expression. Plaintiffs also argued that applicants who are uncomfortable dealing directly with the police chief, such as an applicant wishing to protest alleged civil rights abuses by police, might be discouraged from applying for a parade ordinance altogether. The district court concluded that the in-person meeting requirement chills substantially more speech than is necessary to achieve the end [of promoting public health and safety]. The City argues on appeal that while the district court agreed there is a significant governmental interest in gathering information on parade logistics, it erroneously applied a least intrusive means analysis consistent with strict scrutiny, rather than the more relaxed narrow tailoring analysis appropriate in intermediate scrutiny. Ward, 491 U.S. at 797-98, 109 S.Ct. 2746. The City further contends that the most effective way to arrange a parade route with the police department is to do so in person and states that it has a policy of not rigidly adhering to the requirement of a face-to-face meeting if it is not necessary to serve the stated purposes of the ordinance. The plaintiffs reply that there are no guidelines to suggest when such a waiver would be granted and that the supposed policy of not rigidly adhering to the meeting requirement (which the ordinance states is a condition to issuance of the permit) is unsupported by any written criteria, evidence of established practice, or specific precedent. While the question is close, we believe the provision is overbroad in certain respects, especially given its unyielding language (the applicant must meet with the Police Chief and do so as a condition to [the permit's] issuancethe latter seeming to rule out the police department's alleged policy of not always requiring a face-to-face meeting). We agree with the City, however, that meeting face-to-face with the Police Chief is not an unreasonable way in most instances to work out a route, and that this requirement, as a general rule, is constitutionally acceptable, provided provision is made for reasonable exceptions. For one, it would seem necessary to allow for meeting with the Chief's delegate in case the chief is unavailable. For another, it may be unduly burdensome for a parade organizer who lives, or whose work takes him, some distance away from the City, to sit down with the Chief or his delegate. And there is the possibility that some activist leaders may experience the kind of acute discomfort that plaintiffs hypothesize at sitting down with the Chief because of the nature of their cause. All of these concerns, to a greater or lesser degree, suggest that in this age of e-mail, express mail, fax and telephone, requiring, inflexibly, meeting with the Chief in person within the specified ten-day period as a mandatory condition of issuance of the permit burdens substantially more speech than is necessary. Ward, 491 U.S. at 799, 109 S.Ct. 2746. The City can address the problem in various ways. One way, of course, is simply to provide some acceptable alternatives to meeting with the Chief. Another would be to provide that an applicant may, if good cause existed, request an alternative, and the Chief or his delegate should allow the request if reasonable and practicable to do so. To take the above concerns into account is not equivalent to applying the inappropriate least-restrictive means test, see Ward, 491 U.S. at 797-98, 109 S.Ct. 2746, but rather applies the principle that a regulation of this type may not burden substantially more speech than is necessary to further the government's legitimate interests. Ward, 491 U.S. at 799, 109 S.Ct. 2746. Hence, one or more alternatives to a face-to-face meeting with the Chief need to be provided. Lacking such alternative or alternatives, the meeting provision as it currently stands is overbroad.
The plaintiffs argued below that the parade ordinance is unconstitutional on its face and as applied because it does not provide any exception or reduction to the potentially large permit fee for citizens or groups for whom the fee causes a substantial hardship. They argued successfully to the district court that the lack of a financial exemption leaves those citizens and groups unable to pay the fee without open, ample alternatives for communication. Where, as here, however, there are ample alternative forums for speech, we see insufficient justification for the district court's ruling that the Constitution mandates an indigency exception, in effect forcing general taxpayers to support financially a particular organizer's event. i. District Court's Analysis The district court relied on the Supreme Court's assertion in Murdock, 319 U.S. at 111, 63 S.Ct. 870, that [f]reedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion are available to all, not merely to those who can pay their own way. The district court observed that in cases where bonds and insurance premiums are required for a parade permit, courts have found that the requirements imposed financial demands that burdened the expressive activities of those with insufficient financial means more than necessary to achieve the governmental interest. The district court asked whether the sidewalks and parks of a city represent a reasonable alternative to the streets and concluded, based on the testimony of a sociologist called as an expert witness by the plaintiffs, that sidewalks have less symbolic significance than do streets and are inadequate as alternatives for logistical reasons. Plaintiffs' expert witness was an assistant professor of sociology at Bowdoin College, who testified that sidewalks were not a satisfactory alternative location for parades. He testified, inter alia, that street marches attract more attention as they are more likely to inconvenience the general public by interrupting traffic and disrupting routines. He further testified that street marches also have positive connotations because of the American tradition of successful protest marches, such as the 1963 March on Washington. By contrast, he thought, sidewalk marches have less symbolic significance and provide logistical challenges because sidewalks are narrower and prevent the carrying of large banners. The district court also expressed concern that Augusta's parade ordinance arguably requires the securing of permits for sidewalk marches as well as for street marches, despite the City's insistence that permits were not needed for sidewalk marches. The language of the ordinance refers to the use of public ways within the city, which could, the district court said, easily be construed to include sidewalks.