by Ryan
Orlando, FL

Background Information

On Tuesday, October 9, 2007, Orlando Food Not Bombs member Eric Montanez was found "Not Guilty" of the new crime of feeding too many hungry in a downtown Orlando park. Meanwhile, other Orlando Food Not Bombs members were wrapped up cooking dinner–tomato-veggie stew, rice and baked apples–our third meal prepared that day. The occasion was "Lake Eola Ladle Fest," a solidarity event and celebration which included three meals per day among other things.

The Law

Eric was arrested for allegedly violating a new ordinance, an amendment to Sec 18a.01,of the code of the City of Orlando. This specifically made "Large Group Feedings" illegal. "Large Group Feedings" are defined as:

"an event intended to attract, attracting, or likely to attract 25 or more people, including distributors and servers, in a park or park facility owned or controlled by the City, including adjacent sidewalks and rights-of-way in the GDPD [Greater Orlando Parks District] area within the limits of the City of Orlando, Florida, extending out a two (2) mile radius in all directions from City Hall and including all of the parks and park facilities owned or controlled by the City touched by that radius, in their entirety, for the delivery or service of food."

This new ordinance requires that groups intending to engage in "large group feedings" apply for a permit to do so. Said permits are for single-time use and available to groups to serve a maximum of two times per year–obviously intended to severely hinder the actions of the Food Not Bombs here.

The ordinance was passed following complaints from local businesses and property developers for concern over property value, food safety, increased crime committed by the homeless following servings and large group feedings being "detrimental to the aesthetic atmosphere of the park" among a couple other things. However, the City Council, through suggesting an alternative feeding sight brought to mind images of "separate but equal"

As far as the validity of the city's claims, the specific site recommended–Sylvia Lane– is in an area notorious for violence against the homeless. In the year preceding the ordinance, there were eight reported incidents of assault against the homeless, one of which was the murder of August Felix, a local homeless resident. This is how much the city cares about crime. Additionally, the site is literally a ten-foot, razor-wire-topped fenced-in parking lot under the 408 Expressway, next to the Orlando Utilities Commission's power station and the CSX tracks. There is no running water to wash one's hands and three to five porta-potties. There were also usually between two and five picnic tables, but the amenities of this site ended there–food safety, my foot!

On Tuesday, July 24, 2006, the Orlando City Council passed this ordinance 5-2. Food Not Bombs, Stop the Ordinance Partnership (S.T.O.P.–a broad-based coalition of homeless advocacy groups, religious groups and other concerned individuals, including Orlando Food Not Bombs, the Central Florida ACLU, CodePink Orlando, the Young Communist League, etc.) as well as non-affiliated individuals protested outside Orlando City Hall to call attention to this heinous ordinance. The meeting itself was deliberately drawn out with 60 or so individuals speaking for the allotted five minutes on why or why not the Council should pass the measure. In my estimation there was only one person speaking for the ordinance for every five people speaking vehemently against it. It should also be noted that those against the ordinance were a marvelously diverse group: there were Food Not Bombs members, people of religious ideologies, residents of the more-affluent Thornton Park and Lake Eola Heights downtown neighborhoods, and many others. Those of a leftist persuasion saw us as a necessary social service, confronting a hindrance upon our civil rights. Those of a fiscal-minded, rightist mindset saw us as a public service their tax dollars didn't need to fund.

Our Response

Being that this City Council meeting was on a Tuesday, our next serving was the immediate next day. As a collective, we decided not to give this ordinance even a teaspoon of validity and we began to brainstorm ways around the ordinance without actually obtaining a permit. Our first inclination was to the thought that "it's illegal to feed in the parks, but not illegal to eat there." That's just what we used the next day. We assembled a beautiful spread in the back of my van and parked it in a metered spot, not more than 50 feet from where we usually served. We then brought those who were there to eat to the van three-at-a-time (so as not to block the sidewalk) to get their food and then they'd head back to the park to eat. There were equally as many cops as news-team staff, and quickly enough, it was revealed that what we were doing was both legal and serving food en masse. The media ate it up, figuratively speaking.

Multiple-Group Defense

In the following months we were forced to diversify our tactics as the police would bring new interpretations of the ordinance–sometimes as frequently as weekly–that would make our previously legal serving tactics illegal. Meanwhile within S.T.O.P., we brewed up additional tactics. These in particular used the idea that no group could serve 25 or more people, including servers. Our idea was to bring out many groups, and ensure that none served more than 24 (this included space for one server per group).

This tactic was employed on November 24 when S.T.O.P. member groups had a group sharing in Lake Eola Park–the first since it was made illegal. One group, represented by the owner of Dandelion Communitea (a local-organic urban tea place– check it out if you're in town!) even brought out a couple whole Tofurkeys.

About a third of the line of about 100 had been served before the police showed up. I guess it really caught them by surprise that we'd dare bring our subversive ladles into that park. The officer asked us if we had a permit, to which we replied "no" but since there were multiple groups present–each not feeding more that 24 people–our serving didn't fit the criteria of a legally defined "large group feeding," and thus a permit was not necessary. The officer shrugged and took down the names of the groups and said it was OK–and conveniently enough, this was all captured on camera.

A couple Wednesdays later, the area where we had moved to be just outside the restricted area for large group feedings–the foot of one of the most expensive condo buildings downtown–had a new "no parking" zone, and when unloading food, an Orlando Food Not Bombs member received a parking ticket–while still in the car, unloading materials. This was the last straw. We decided that we would be moving back into the park for the duration.

The following week we were back in the park and our "group defense" was working marvelously. This is about when the police started deploying their hardcore surveillance. Not only were they out, sometimes, in dozens, idly observing our criminal ladling, most times there was at least one officer with a camera filming us. Later on, we discovered that there had been an undercover vice officer (duties include monitoring gambling, prostitution, drug trafficking and free food, apparently) dressed up as a homeless individual, and equipped with a high-tech pair of video camera sunglasses.

April 4, 2007

On this afternoon, a conspicuous black SUV with masked people inside, partially hidden by the dark tint, was parked in the circle near where we serve. Several people attending the sharing had taken notice of its presence. One person, our friend Deidra, with Codepink, was alarmed that the individuals inside the SUV were filming with her daughter on the scene. She called 911 to report them as two of our allies, Joe Miranda and Eddie Melendez, from the National Latino Officers Association, checked out the SUV and caught on that it was actually a police vehicle. Shortly thereafter, several police cruisers pulled into the circle next to the picnic area and roughly three got out and walked past 20 other people, most serving food and proceeded to arrest Eric. The arrest affidavit swore that Eric was asked to present ID, to which he responded by throwing it on the ground, but it was neither true, nor legally (or practically, for that matter) relevant, and was determined to be inadmissible in court. In the wake of this arrest, the first of its kind in Florida, no one expected it to be taken seriously by the prosecution. The corrections officers who processed Eric after his arrest thought it was so silly, they skipped him to the front of every line and he was out of jail six hours after his arrest–a record, I'm sure.

Legal Proceedings

Eric was represented by Jacqueline Dowd–the lawyer who is also currently handling our federal case against the city to get the ordinance off the books for good–for free.

Right off the bat she was able to piece together past case details and compile information and materials to a degree that I had never seen. Our defense was the same we used with the cops, but translated into the language of the law. Basically, we called for a motion to dismiss based on entrapment–Officer Dunlap, an agent of the law, had said that servings conducted in the manner present on November 24 were, in fact, in compliance with the law. Jackie also referenced a previous case that happened in 1963 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That involved some racially-triggered arrests at a Southern university (a historically black school) lunch counter sit-in. After these arrests of their friends, a group of students held a protest outside the courthouse in reaction. The police showed up and informed them of a Louisiana state statute that prohibited picketing or protesting "near" a courthouse. The police recommended the demonstration be moved across the street and the students would be well within the law. The demonstration moved, and, not surprisingly, the students were arrested under the statute they had been told didn't apply to them at their location. They were convicted, but appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which threw out the convictions citing that the students' due-process rights had been violated.

This essentially is a legally similar case in which the Supreme Court had ruled that if an agent of the law–in both cases, the police–cannot specifically state that something was legal, and then later arrest that person for what they were told explicitly was legal conduct.

Lake Eola Ladle Fest

So meanwhile, our friend Adam, an amazingly active Food Not Bombs-er, had returned to the states from a six-month stay in Bogota, where he help found a Comida No Bombas (Food Not Bombs) chapter there. Upon returning we discussed possible solidarity actions to coincide with the trial. The whole story had blown up and become a need-to-cover-item for the media in the months it had been allowed to ferment, so we had decided it would already draw a lot of attention to itself, so whatever was chosen to do would not need to necessarily rely on media to exist or be successful.

With this, an older, not-yet-implemented idea was revived: an occupation of the park's picnic area, done without a permit, but well-enough within the law so it would not be surrounded by police lines and ruin our now favorable public opinion (not that it really would matter, but public support wouldn't hurt us). The event would be called "Lake Eola Ladle Fest" and the original plan included a wide variety of attendees with tables, workshops, music, three meals a day, and games, among other things. The occupation part of the event would consist of people being in the park from its opening at 6 a.m. until its closing at midnight to coincide with the days of the trial, October 8 and 9–as well as the 10th for the pre-trial of five Food Not Bombs members (the Cruddy Dyer-rhea Drum Corps 5) arrested for involvement at a protest outside a campaign fundraiser for Orlando's Mayor Buddy Dyer–a major supporter of the ordinance.

We sent out several e-mails to try to network with other Food Not Bombs chapters in the area to spread the responsibility of nine sharings in three days, as well as printed up fliers and made phone calls. We had a couple promising submissions of intent to assist with cooking, but none really materialized. The actualization of the event was a lot of cooking, serving and cleaning, but fun and productive nonetheless. We accomplished sharing the amount of meals we'd usually serve in two months in just three long days, as well as proved publicly, the unenforceability of such classist legislation as the "large group feedings" ordinance.

From the first breakfast of Ladle Fest on there was an abundance of media on site questioning in their non-partial, media way, the ordinance, the actions of the police and the city and how we circumvented the law to be able to serve without a permit in three days, four-and-a-half times what a permit would allow groups to serve in a year. This triggered the most interesting public responses. Comments sections to preliminary news reports on Ladle Fest and the progress of the trial were a mess with the widest variety of opinions of us and the city. Christians and Democrats praised us and backed it up with philosophical quotations from Thoreau to Confucius. Even those originally in favor of the ordinance had changed their minds when they were exposed to Eric's legal plight.

There were indeed still many against us and against Eric, whom they saw as just a media-whore, using the homeless to make a point, and those vehemently asserting law as a sensible equivalent to what is right–but both camps were fervently rebutted and exposed for the classists and the naive people they were, respectively.

The Trial

Meanwhile, in court, the city prosecution was, unbeknownst to themselves, making fools of the institutions they were employed to represent. They were, for a conviction, required to prove three things:

• Eric Montanez knowingly participated in a legally defined "large group feeding."
• Said "large group feeding" took place in Lake Eola Park.
• Said "large group feeding" was conducted without a permit.

Even in the relative simplicity of the charges and whatnot, the legal process continued. A jury was selected to see the evidence brought forth by the City, who in a fashion akin to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant" presented their evidence.

"I want tell you about the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this happened here, they got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars, being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it. And they was using up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer's station. They was taking plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that's not to mention the aerial photography."

In our case, there was an undercover vice officer, whose duties include the monitoring of prostitution, gambling, drug trafficking and homeless food sharings. Said officer was equipped with state-of-the-art sunglasses with concealed spy cameras as well as the blacked-out SUV parked in the circle with cameras and masked police spies. Both videos, although uncompelling (and outright unconvincing–one's line of sight was blocked by trees and the other, the video of the undercover vice officer, was distracted looking upwards at a beautiful 250-year old oak branch covered with resurrection ferns that hung overhead at the time of the arrest) were submitted with the childish confidence a chess player has when saying "checkmate." The City presented testimony from the park ranger on duty that day, who confirmed that a permit was not obtained that day, as well as the testimonies of Officer Dunlap and the officers who were called to the scene of a non-investigated, already defined "large group feeding." One officer even testified during the city's examination that Eric had essentially been set up and the officers had arrived on the scene of the crime with the intent to arrest him. In addition to all this, there were also between two and eight police cruisers every Wednesday for nearly a full year following the passage of the ordinance, and their salaries while sitting idly, playing the role of State intimidators for roughly an hour each Wednesday, were paid by tax money–a fact that likely fueled the mounting public outrage over the entire situation.

Court also brought out some of the most severe classist comments made by the City and the City Prosecutor, Kim Laskoff. This fact worked out to our advantage in proving what little legal basis the city was working with and in during the cross-examination of Pastor Brian Nichols–a member of S.T.O.P. and founder of Downtown Orlando's homeless-established church, the First Vagabonds Church of God–the prosecution tried to establish that the City had indeed provided a venue for groups like Food Not Bombs and First Vagabonds Church of God to conduct their services–Sylvia Lane. Pastor Brian contested the shortcomings of said venue and mentioned the ten-foot barbed-wire-topped fence the underpasses parking lot was surrounded by. Kim Laskoff quickly rebutted, "So the homeless don't steal the picnic tables the city has so graciously provided for them?"

As quickly as it was said it was called attention to by our lawyer Jackie's television-esque "OB-jec-TION!" The City did most of the work throughout the rest of the trial to discredit their own claims to "legitimate" care for public safety and the separate safety of the homeless.

Culmination of the Trial and Ladle Fest

On the 9th of October, the second day of both Eric's trial and Ladle Fest, the two proceedings merged. With Ladle Fest we were still up to our eyeballs in cooking food, transporting meals, collecting food, serving the food, washing pots and dishes that weren't washed by those who had used them and giving sparse interviews to the now-annoying news crews who were journalistically doing "walk-ins"–dramatic news-worthy on-camera teasers where the reporter would literally walk towards the camera while offering sound-bites like "one group is purposefully defying a city ordinance to coincide with their friend's trial for the same crime, more at 11," commonly impeding the flow of people in line or walking to tables with their food.

In court, closing arguments were made. Jackie's called the arrest "nothing less than a set-up," as the officers had been called to the scene, with the determination that a crime was in progress before the "crime" had even taken place or been investigated. The jury deliberated and found Eric to be "not guilty."

It wasn't until we were getting ready to leave our kitchen with the food that we received the news that the jury had found Eric "not guilty." This made our sleep-deprived delirious pace of cooking pick up and made us all ecstatic. This marked a partial victory for the event, with the rest of Ladle Fest sure to follow suit.

When we arrived at the park, we were able to reunite with Eric and bask in our now-legally proven legitimacy in defiance of this unjust ordinance. The city and the police were embarrassed and could only look on with their tail between their legs.

The rest of Ladle Fest proceeded uninterrupted. The pre-trial of the Cruddy Dyer-rhea Drum Corps 5 was rescheduled, due to a scheduling mishap that put it on the same day as the second day of Eric's trial, so the third day of Ladle Fest was just food, and we liked it that way.

Analysis and Legal Significance

As for Ladle Fest, its deviation from its original plan wasn't detrimental to the outcome or success of the event, although if the occupation had happened according to plan and our avenues for networking had been effective enough to at least bring out some additional help for cooking–the main impediment to constant occupation–the event may have been a little less stressful.

It was discussed that better planning of the event and delegation of responsibilities would have dramatically reduced stress to those who cooked from 6 a.m. throughout the day until completing collecting food and dumpstering around 2 a.m., only to repeat it the next day and the day after. This, along with lack of sleep for the same reason, put tempers a little high and resulted in stressing out all who came to help or weren't able to put in those hours. Some feelings were hurt in the process unnecessarily and a lot of people left the event with a feeling of alienation.

Acknowledgement of all contributions needs to be a top priority. The sense of community we seek to preserve relies heavily on maintaining a basic level of "posi" and kindness, without these, our community will only serve to mock the cruelty and hierarchy it's championed to provide refuge from.

On a positive note, the impact of the court's decision as well as the success of the breakfast, lunch and dinner servings without police monitoring or intervention proved on a large scale not only the City's ill-conceived punitive legislation's shortcomings in dealing with issues of homelessness were ineffective, but also unenforceable.

We have seen a recent flux of articles written in to newspapers, notably, "Orlando, Home of Unenforceable Laws," from the Palm Beach Post, as well as others. In an Orlando Sentinel online poll, as of the day of Eric's verdict, 65 percent of those polled–roughly 4,400 people–did not support the ordinance. Those who did and added their two cents to the comments section of the respective articles showed themselves to be blatantly racist, classist and unintelligent.

Furthermore, this case will, in legal terms, set a precedent for other cases, both here in Orlando and abroad. Unless flagrantly unjust, judges tend not to contradict similar rulings, so with all the city governments in the country watching this case, we were able to send a message that they will not succeed in enforcing similar measures.

In short, the event could be viewed as a success, based upon its ends. The means will definitely need to be looked at and worked on if we are to succeed with similar actions in the future while preserving or improving the feeling within our communities.

I'd rather not be too cliché; however, the battle is won, but the war is far from over. This verdict greatly strengthens our federal lawsuit against the city to strike the law from the books, but the trial isn't until the summer of 2008–many things can happen between now and then. As for a possibility of winning that–who knows? We've already made great leaps and bounds to ensure that the verdict isn't really even for us to continue serving anymore, but in a practical sense, for the eleven-or-so other groups who've had to stop serving downtown. We've already proven the law to be punitive and unenforceable, and the majority of the public does not support it. The City has spent a huge amount of resources only to look mean and ineffective, publicly. If the federal case doesn't remove the law from the books, we'll still serve in Lake Eola Park, like we do now and did before the ordinance, proving it to be arbitrary paragraphs in the code of the City of Orlando.

For more information, check out:

• OrlandoFoodNotBombs.org
• Stop-Orlando.org