City Council Meeting

Brian LubkermanstaffSo that's an important distinction. The city permits lots of events through parks and rec and otherwise, private events that occur, hundreds, I would say, of events on an annual basis. this would expressly prohibit them prohibit the carrying of firearms at those events however an important exception many of these events take place already within a city park where the prohibition already exists I'll give you an example of an interesting little dichotomy because we were talking about fall festival so fall festival under the current ordinance fall festival takes place almost completely not within property so there would be no prohibition under the existing ordinance. However, there's a small sliver that takes place in Old Town Square. Old Town Square is a city park. There'd be a prohibition

I could The other issue, and the chief noted this, is taking an event like Fall Festival, you would need to post signage at all entrances to the festival. We all know that there's multiple places to enter the festival. I think what some other jurisdictions have done, and we've seen this in other jurisdictions, is all of a sudden you start seeing barriers go up around events. and you sort of funnel everybody into one or two or three or four entrances. I'm not saying that's where we would end up here, but there would be logistical and legal issues with where the signage would need to be if basically there are multiple points of entry to an event, exit to an event. I'm not saying that to discourage anybody from doing this.

Oh, I'll start. So the point of the signage is to put a reasonable person on notice that they will be in violation of something if they enter a space. So I wouldn't say that there are guidelines. I think it's a little bit of common sense, and I think different localities do different things. So that's a short answer to your question. I think we would always attempt to ensure that individuals are put on proper notice that they could be in violation of the law. So again, we have not scoped any any properties at this point. We haven't scoped you know, I keep talking about fall festival. That's an easy one to look at. There are other events depending on where they are. The logistics could be different, but I'm cautioning again that there could be other things that need to

Billy Batesthat is something that we can't ignore and we also emphatically cannot simply accept the current status quo as the null condition, if you will. You know, at the end of the day, we have to make a decision between all the options that we have before us here and none is any more valid than the others. simply because that's the way we've done it. So at any rate, and even before this study even came out, I was in favor of making these changes. And that's also because I simply don't think that, you know, a park or a fall festival or what have you is an appropriate place for someone, a civilian, you know, not law enforcement, not military, to be carrying a gun. I know that many may disagree with me.

Brian Lubkermanstaffwell so right now it's easy you have public buildings whether they're complete public buildings or portions of buildings that are private that are being used for public purposes there's recreation centers for example and there's city parks those are easy to delineate adding city permitted events we've already talked about events that are otherwise permitted by the city because those tend to be in public parks but adding city permitted events will be a discrete knows where the fall festival is and that would be signed. There's no prohibition on broader public areas that are not otherwise within parks or at a time of a public event. So I guess the answer to your question is it would be easy because there would be no signage required because there's

Natalie HinesleystaffCan I ask a question for that? For the open spaces that you're talking about, is it the language in the county ordinance, I believe, that says open? It's either open spaces or public spaces or roadways adjacent to the permanent event. So are you asking like if we did fall festival we would do a map of our ops plan like we typically do But then the adjacent streets and public ways would be highlighted or somewhat Communicated to be prohibited.

Thomas PetersonYeah, so it would be great to understand that more clearly. I mean, just for the sake of conversation during the fall festival if somebody's trying to get out. What I would

Natalie HinesleystaffThat's probably a consideration into the ops planning too. If this were to be expanded, one of the things with the ops plan, the operations planning that might change is you would extend where the road closures are, things like that that would be worked into the planning phase of this to where during the fall festival or July 4th you don't drive down Chambridge Road. So things like that would be considered in the planning around a new ordinance.

Brian LubkermanstaffAnd to give a really good example, so taking fall festival again, I would deem it highly unlikely that there would be a prohibition on 123 when fall festival is occurring down north and everything, just because it's adjacent to the event. I mean, there would be some common sense associated with this.