PORTLAND, Maine — The city of Portland has agreed to pay $175,000 in legal fees after losing a court battle over a local law that effectively banned panhandling on the city’s median strips.
The city agreed to pay the fee to the Boston-based law firm Goodwin Procter, which served as counsel for the plaintiffs in the case, alongside the Maine American Civil Liberties Union, according to a filing in U.S. District Court.
The settlement payment resolves the last issue in the case, over attorneys’ fees and costs.
“Overall, the city is pleased that this matter is finally resolved so as to avoid any additional unnecessary protracted litigation,” city spokeswoman Jessica Grondin wrote.
Grondin said the funds will come from the city attorney, or Corporation Counsel’s, budget set aside for such settlements.
The case dealt with a city law that sought to ban standing, sitting, staying, driving or parking in the city’s median strips.
The Maine ACLU challenged the law on behalf of three plaintiffs and won in U.S. District Court and on an appeal by the city.
U.S. First Circuit Court Judge David J. Barron ruled in September that Portland’s ordinance violates the First Amendment right to free speech “because it indiscriminately bans virtually all expressive activity in all of the city’s median strips and thus is not narrowly tailored to serve the city’s interest in protecting public safety.”
The District Court ruling had thrown out the city ordinance because it found the law effectively barred one type of speech — panhandling — while allowing campaign signs to proliferate on medians, a standard called strict scrutiny.
The city noted in its statement that it convinced the appeals court that the law was “content neutral,” or that it didn’t discriminate against one type of speech while allowing another.
Even with that finding, the First Circuit Court of Appeals found that even under a less stringent standard of review, the law was overly broad in restricting various forms of speech or other expression on median strips.
“In fact,” Judge Barron wrote in the decision issued in September, “it is hard to imagine a median strip ordinance that could ban more speech.”