Opinion ID: 203074
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Excessive Discretion

Text: 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.