Kansas City, Don't Get on This Bandwagon

Just this past weekend I read something that upset me very much: the City Council of Kansas City, Missouri is considering making it illegal to give food to homeless people without having a permit from the city to do so.

You can read the proposed ordinance here (PDF).

Because it's a couple pages long and legal writing is dense, I'll also excerpt the relevant bits of it here:

Section 8-301.11 of the 2005 Food Code is amended to read as follows: A PERSON may not operate a FOOD ESTABLISHMENT without a valid PERMIT to operate issued by the REGULATORY AUTHORITY. A PERMIT is required to apply for and obtain and pay for a separate FOOD ESTABLISHMENT PERMIT for each of the types of FOOD ESTABLISHMENT operations listed in subsections (1) through (13): 

... 

(13) Food Sharing Permit: issued to a not-for-profit granted tax-exempt status under any provision of Section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code ... that is distributing food free of charge for the sole purpose of impacting food insecurity in Kansas City, Missouri. Food sharing permits are not intended to cover food sharing taking place within permitted food establishments. Any already-permitted food establishments shall not need a food sharing permit to offer food free of charge to the public within the confines of the already-permitted establishment. All potentially hazardous food shall be prepared in a permitted kitchen and any processed foods must be pre-packaged. All food shall be labeled with the name or identifier of the permittee and disposed of four (4) hours after being removed from active temperature control. On site food preparation is prohibited with a Food Sharing Permit. Permit holders shall provide waste receptacles if none are readily available or if on-site receptacles are not adequate to collect the waste generated, while distributing food pursuant to the permit and when necessary, shall collect and remove any food or container waste. Food sharing permittees shall not distribute food within one block of a school on a day in which school is in session during the 30 minute period preceding school or the 30 minute period after adjournment. All other Food Code requirements shall be followed, including the obtaining of food handler cards. Re-inspection fees shall be those as set for catering permits. There shall be no cost for the initial food sharing permit or for any routine annual renewals.

It's not clear from this text whether any of this applies to a single person handing out food on their own. (At least, it's not clear to me.)

I'm also not clear on what the implications are for a group that's not a formally recognized nonprofit, like a social club, that might want to distribute food.

The ordinance itself, and City Council member Melba Curls in comments to the public at a protest rally held June 4 at City Hall, cite public health as one of the reasons why the ordinance was drafted.

Intuitively, that makes sense. By making a city-issued permit a requirement to distribute food, the city can keep track of who is distributing food and periodically inspect the kitchens where they prepare it. They can make sure that those kitchens are clean, and that the food that passes through them is not carrying any disease-causing microorganisms.

I'm not sure it would really play out like that, though.

First of all, I'm not aware of any recent outbreaks of food-borne illness here originating in soup kitchens; all the ones I remember reading about originated in restaurants, or on farms or food processing plants.

Example.

Other example.

Other example.

Other example.

(It's true, if the contaminated food items end up in grocery stores, they could find their way to a soup kitchen or food pantry's shelves. But it seems like the most efficient way to catch contaminated produce before it makes someone sick would be to do your screening as each shipment reaches the stores, not at whatever secondary or tertiary destination the food is actually eaten.)

So I'm not sure how helpful this measure will be in reducing the number or extent of outbreaks of food-borne illness, and at the same time I'm sure this will have a chilling effect on efforts to feed the city's hungry people. 

(How could it not? It's adding red tape where before there was none. Also, some of the people who are doing that work showed up at the protest rally and said that the ordinance would make it harder for them to operate. So this isn't just me coming up with hypotheticals; this is a thing that people who work at feeding the homeless say will probably happen.)

I'm also aware of a larger pattern around the nation of criminalizing either homelessness itself or ordinary citizens giving food to homeless people.

And I also know that Kansas City is currently hustling to market itself as a cool, happening city to attract the wealthier members of my generation. 

I am made very cynical about what it means to do that, largely by the spectacle of San Francisco all but waging open war on its poor people to curry favor with the Silicon Valley professional classes. 

Senator Envy

I am often envious of people living in other states, or even other parts of my state, for their awesome state senators and representatives.

As I live in the Kansas City Metro Area, I read a lot about Missouri Sen. Jolie Justus, who represents a district including parts of Kansas City, MO. She's an out lesbian, and the first openly gay member of the Missouri Senate. She also generally seems to look out for her poorest constituents; whenever I see her quoted in the Kansas City Star she seems to be talking about how such-and-such measure would affect the poor, the disabled, the homeless etc. She seems to want to make Missouri a kinder, gentler, more inclusive place.

I have also had reason to wish that I lived in a different part of Kansas, so that Kansas Sen. Marci Francisco would be my senator instead of Sen. Greg Smith. I wrote to both of them (and the rest of the members of the Natural Resources subcommittee of the Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee) concerning an effort to reintroduce black-footed ferrets on private property in western Kansas, and a resolution their committee was considering that would oppose this effort. Sen. Francisco wrote back to me, and gave the impression that she was well-informed on the issue, and that she shared my concern that the resolution being discussed was written in a hugely misleading way. She also told me about several efforts she had made to change the language of the resolution by amending it, and that she would keep trying to edit out the parts that she thought were wrong. (Sort of hedging one's bets, is how I took it: the ideal outcome would've been for the resolution to fail, but if it looked like it might pass, it would be less hostile to the reintroduction effort than it would've been without her intervention. I can appreciate that.)

Now I have another state senator to covet and admire from afar: Texas Sen. Wendy Davis. She's filibustering a particularly draconian set of restrictions on abortion that would close the vast majority of Texas's abortion clinics. Should the bill become law, only five clinics (out of 47) could stay open, and those five are all clustered in the eastern part of Texas.

Map:

Map showing all clinics in Texas that offer abortion (top), and all of those clinics that meet the requirements laid out in SB5. Graphic made by Whole Woman's Health

Anyway, Sen. Davis is taking heroic measures to block this bill! She's been standing on the Senate floor and speaking since 11:18 this morning, and she's going to keep speaking until midnight tonight. She has had to stay in that spot for the whole ten hours she's been speaking, and will have to stay there for the two hours and forty-five minutes she still has to go. She can't stop talking, leave (even to use the bathroom), eat or drink. Republican senators have even called foul on her for wearing a back brace at one point in her filibuster. At least she's wearing good shoes!

I am in awe of how hardcore she is. I'm a lot younger than she is, and in good physical shape, but I don't think I could do what she's doing, even on a pure physical level. (Seriously. I can work outside for six, seven or eight hours in the hot sun, like when I dug an 80-foot-long, maybe 18" deep on average trench in my mom's backyard to put in a brick wall border for a giant flowerbed we're still filling up. Did that all by myself, during peak sun hours in a Kansas summer. It was probably high 80s or low 90s*. Yet I am probably 85%-90% certain I would collapse before the end of the twelve-hour, forty-two-minute filibuster she's powering through.) Obviously I wouldn't have the quick wits to come up with original, relevant content to fill a twelve-hour filibuster; apparently in real life you can't just grab the nearest book and start reading aloud.

*For any international readers I might have, those numbers are on the Fahrenheit scale. In degrees Celsius, it was probably 30-35. Hot by my standards, anyway. Some of you might scoff at that, but I am a transplant from further north, and I miss winter.