Why?
Short answer:
Because we think the land that belongs to the government, and therefor the people, shouldn’t be closed off based on the whims of a private business. If I have certain rights on the sidewalk it shouldn’t be possible to curtail those rights by entering into leasing deals with corporations.
Longer answer:
This decade has seen some fairly outrageous deals between local governments and businesses, most notably the Kelo v. City of New London case. In that case the city of New London used the right of eminent domain to take land from citizens and give it over to a corporation under the rationale that the redevelopment and subsequent tax revenues would benefit the general citizenry, even if some individuals were negatively impacted.
In that case the city eventually prevailed and the individuals and businesses who had their land taken lost before the Supreme Court, a decision that greatly inflamed many people.
The incident that upset those of us behind Free Our Streets occurred when Chip Py was accosted by a security guard in Downtown Silver Spring and told he couldn’t take pictures. Py, familiar with the law (as detailed over at Burt Krages’ site), told the guard that of course he could, he was on a public street. Not so, he was told by both the guard the the management of the Peterson Companies: you’re standing on our land, we leased it from the city. The Washington Post’s Marc Fisher quotes Gary Stith, director of Mongomery Country’s Silver Spring government office, as saying that while Country law requires the developer to give the public access to the downtown “access and management are two different things.”
Plain and simple, we think this stance is simply unacceptable. To claim that the public’s interest is represented by allowing them “access” to County land - in other words, their land - but restricting their rights and freedoms to what’s in the interest of a corporate entity just doesn’t pass the smell test. Downtown Silver Spring and Ellsworth Drive appears in every way to be public land and gives no indication you have wandered out of the County and into what the Peterson company wishes to control like it was the inside of an office building.
In this case on this street we were inspired to action because of photography, however the implications of this kind of deal go far beyond that. If a corporate entity can receive public land and run it in a manner that better suits them, what other restrictions might be placed on public usage? Gary Stith stated “We wanted them to maintain and manage the area” as an explanation of why it’s okay for these kinds of constraints to be placed on the citizenry when they’re along Ellsworth Drive, but what would stop the city from choosing to contract out an even larger section of land and applying the same logic.
If this is acceptable for a shopping thoroughfare, why not, say, make the same arrangement for a nine block region that just happens to surround a government building, then claim that the citizenry doesn’t have any right to picket, protest, or assemble in that region because that area is under private control. Why not contract all the streets in a city to be maintained by a corporation and state that they must allow access, but have a right to “manage” what goes on there?
Because they are our streets, and if we are free then they should be free.