Worried that a year-old ban on registered sex offenders in local parks wouldn't hold up in court, Lake Forest's City Council voted Tuesday to repeal the law.
In a 3-2 decision, the council officially undid the measure, which had been on the books since last December and prohibited registered sex offenders from entering city parks.
The law was stricter than the one it was modeled after, a county measure penned by District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and County Supervisor Shawn Nelson.
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The move put the council in the unusual position of saying it was either wrong to enact the ban in the first place or unwilling to defend it. Mayor Kathryn McCullough and Councilmen Scott Voigts and Peter Herzog voted to repeal the law.
The council's two newly elected members, Dwight Robinson and Adam Nick, voted to keep it.
At the council meeting the ban, citing the financial hit the city would take defending itself against lawsuits.
About half the cities in Orange County have enacted similar laws at the request of Rackauckas. However, the county's law suffered a setback when an appeals court overturned the conviction of Hugo Godinez for entering Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley.
In that case, an Orange County appellate panel said the county ban was superseded by a less restrictive state law.
Cty Attorney Scott C. Smith said keeping Lake Forest's law would cost at least $200,000 in legal fees to defend, and that's if the city won in court. Losing could bring penalties, including paying the legal costs of the sex offenders who challenged the ban.
Hmmm. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars will this mis-step cost us? Last night the Mayor revealed that the "day laborer" fiasco 2 years ago (enacting an ordinance that was never applied because it was unconstitutional) cost the City $400,000. She also announced that the recent Marijuana dispensary fights cost us $2,000,000. And these figures do not reflect the expenditures in terms of city staff time and resources. It seems obvious that the City is making poor decisions and these decisions are costing us a lot of money. Better decision making in the first place would be more reflective of being "responsible, fiscally prudent and constitutionally correct."
I wonder what the law and order hand-wringers would say about that??? lol.
If there was an ordinance on the council's table to approve warrantless searches of Lake Forest homes at the discretion of the Sheriff's department with no need for judicial review would Robinson and Nick vote for it's passage? I mean heck, if we could uncover dangerous material that could potentially save one human life....wouldn't it be all worth it? You know, as much as I hate child sex offenders I love my US Constitution more. My love of the US Constitution outweighs my hate for dirty pedophiles. Because I know that once we head down that slippery slope we are no better than North Korea. I don't want the future American generations to live like that. Besides, this city park ban probably included some doo-doo bird who exposed his backside as a joke in public. It's just so stupid on it's face. It makes no sense whatsoever. Have the leaders in our society gone that far off the rails for God sakes? My final question is this. Did the DA's office endorse either Robinson or Nick for their current Council positions? Does anyone know?
The City Council members take an oath to defend the U.S. and the CA Constitutions. As far as I know from their publicity, the DA did not endorse either Nick or Robinson. OC Supervisor Bates endorsed Anderson and Zechmeister, as she did Herzog in 2010.
But I can't seem to find any known political connection between Mr. Nick and the DA's office. But thank you for your response.
linking park restrictions to a reduction in sex crimes, and no way that park restrictions will do anything about the bulk of the sex-offender problem, which is the abuse of children by relatives and other people they know. The laws are simplistic, emotion-based formulas that cloak politicians in an aura of decisiveness. while doing nothing to tackle a ferociously difficult problem. The second thing is that they are a dangerous waste of law-enforcement time and resources. Police departments are already obliged under a welter of federal and state laws to register and monitor sex. offenders. Prosecutors and sheriffs around the country have complained that adding park enforcement to their large and growing offender-management portfolios only hampers their ability to fight crime. The final and most important point is that park bans send offenders underground. You may imagine these men fearsome and creepy, but if communities systematically banish them, denying them the chance to find housing and to lead stable lives under close supervision, they end up doing the logical thing. They congregate in unincorporated poor areas. Or they disappear. The laws your DA and his sidekick are trumpeting risk turning sex offenders into unstable, rootless individuals, harder to track and arguably more dangerous.