The Porterville City Council is one step closer to funding lawsuits by residents against the State of California after voting to bring a new “Individual Liberty” ordinance back to a future meeting. While the ordinance lays out a number of hot-button social and political issues that council members want to take a stand on, it doesn’t focus on one issue in particular, and punts the parameters of the lawsuit funding program to a future meeting.
The “Commitment to the Principles of Individual Liberty” ordinance, approved with a 4-1 vote on Tuesday, October 21, sets out a series of commitments by the City of Porterville and would create a “legal defense assistance program and fund” that residents could tap into.
The ordinance states the “scope and requirements of the [legal assistance] program shall be set forth by Resolution of the City Council,” though no guidelines have been discussed yet.
It combines themes from two prior proposals in February and March: a “Parental Rights in Education” ordinance, which would have required schools to tell parents if their children requested pronouns different from their sex at birth, and a “Protect Women’s Safe Spaces” ordinance, which would have made it unlawful for someone to use a bathroom, locker room, or other “private facility” that does not match with their sex at birth.
The new ordinance also states that the City of Porterville would uphold specific commitments, without any specific penalties or requirements placed upon schools or businesses in Porterville. Those commitments include:
- That the City of Porterville “will not engage in illegal discrimination against individuals based on their vaccination or medical status, and will respect the privacy of individuals’ medical information,”
- That the City of Porterville “shall not follow or enforce executive or administrative directives that have been determined to unlawfully infringe upon constitutionally protected rights,”
- That the Porterville City Council “affirms its commitment that City residents, to the fullest extent required by the Federal and State Constitutions, are entitled to be made aware of information and matters related to their minor children’s health and education, including all physical health matters, educational curriculum, or sexual and/or gender orientation, identity or expression,”
- That the Porterville City Council “affirms its commitment that City residents, to the fullest extent provided for by the State and Federal Constitution, are entitled to legal protections against discrimination, including discrimination based on sex, and women are entitled to equal educational opportunities and safe private environments in order to minimize the risk of sexual harassment and violence.”
Public comment
“I don’t think that our children should grow up going into restrooms or stuff like that and a man walks in on them or vice-versa. I think that liberties should be protected, medical freedoms should be protected, and parents’ rights should be given back to them,” Darin Garrett, a Porterville resident said.
Garrett also noted the controversy around the ordinance, and said that those who came up to speak on the issue should speak respectfully to the councilmembers and represent Porterville with “love, kindness, peace and forgiveness.”
“I just can’t comprehend we’re even discussing this where I’ve got to worry about my two little granddaughters and a man walking in on them, so I just want to encourage you guys to do the right thing,” Rick Sullins said.
Diane Wagner spoke to oppose the ordinance.
“This is about politics. It’s about an attempt to legalize discrimination and fund it with public dollars. It’s about inserting the government and the extreme views of some of our city leaders into classrooms, businesses, and bathrooms,” Wagner said. “This ordinance is about control – control over what other people’s children can learn, how teachers can teach, and even how individuals can live or express themselves.”
Karen Anderson spoke to remind the council of “their responsibility to represent everyone in this community.”
“Not just those who look like you, think like you, worship like you, and vote like you – but everyone,” Anderson said. “Public office is not about advancing personal ideology and rewarding political allies.”
Council discussion includes dissent
Porterville Mayor Greg Meister, opening the discussion on the ordinance, called it “very exciting.”
He drew parallels between this ordinance and sanctuary city ordinances in larger areas of the state, saying the council is “following their lead,” only focusing on “addressing constitutional issues and protecting constitutional rights” instead of immigration policy.
“There’s already a precedent set that holds standards like this, where you have cities like LA – who is a charter city as well – and they use the same structure to protect illegal immigrants,” Meister said. “And you can go to the City of San Francisco or the County of San Diego who have structures like this to protect what they feel is their constituents.”
(Los Angeles, San Diego County, and San Francisco do have ordinances prohibiting municipal resources being used to assist immigration enforcement officials, but they do not provide funding for citizens to sue over immigration policies.)
Council member AJ Rivas said he didn’t understand “what people were so afraid of” around the ordinance.
“It’s real simple. It’s not violating anybody’s rights,” Rivas said. “This protects everybody.”
Meister added that California lawmakers continue to “violate” parental rights and “intrude into constitutionally protected rights,” and that critics might not “see the bigger picture.”
“There will be attorney groups that do pro bono work – and the city is not taking the stance,” Meister said. “It is the constituent that would be suing the state – the city is only helping direct [lawsuits].”
Councilmember Raymond Beltran spoke against the idea of a legal assistance fund. He said that while he’d signed on to a prior parental rights proclamation, this ordinance could open a “pandora’s box.”
“Going down this road just enables in four years, in six years or eight years, when council turns over at some point – people come with their agenda and say we’re a sanctuary city, or something that might be opposed to some of the council members that sit up here now,” Beltran said.
“We’re going to create this fund of money we don’t have so that people can then just say, hey, I want to sue because I don’t believe in this. We can’t pick and choose what constituents come and want to sue the federal government,” Beltran said. “Maybe somebody wants to sue the federal government over immigration, and we’re gonna have to allow that. I don’t think that’s what the taxpayers paid us to come up here to say: ‘Hey, let’s put some of our community needs aside because I don’t like what the state or federal government are doing.’”
“To really jump into this because ‘I want to be bold,’ ‘I want to make a statement,’ – I want to build our damn library, I want to figure out our wastewater treatment center. Those are things I was elected to deal with – not this. I signed on [a parental rights] proclamation, I’ll do that ten times out of ten,” he said. “Let’s stay in our lane, where it’s important to our taxpayers.”
Ed McKervey, an ardent advocate for this ordinance and the prior “Parental Rights” and “Women’s Safe Spaces” ordinances, responded with a look back to the impact of COVID restrictions on the City of Porterville.
“When we mandated these things in COVID in the city, people lost their livelihoods. Churches went out of business, because of the policies of the city and the policies of the state. We’re not gonna do that again,” McKervey said. “COVID decimated a lot of cities – and they gave us $20m in ARPA funds, and we wasted them, and we could have built a library, and we didn’t.”
“This is a really good thing to do to stand on the principles of the constitution and individual liberty, and we have a duty to protect every citizen in our city, and we work on it all the time with our police and our fire, this is an extension of that because the people are being put in positions and they shouldn’t be put in, and they’ve lost their livelihood as a result, and it’s created division,” McKervey said. “And you need to stand on principle for our people, and not on the politics of this.”
Meister, following after McKervey, rejected the idea of the city council “staying in [its] line,” stating that the citizens of California had “complied into tyranny.”
Council members ultimately voted to have city staff change some parts of the ordinance, including formatting and spelling fixes, and to bring it back for a first reading.
Before his vote, Meister hit back at those who said the city should focus on other priorities, like rebuilding its library.
“Political theater is real,” Meister said. “When you have someone coming up here and saying, ‘I want to build the damn library!’ like they’re hard, we haven’t even settled on the lawsuit. We have a grant fund – we don’t have the funds to build the library today. We don’t have them.”
“You cannot build the library today. It’s political theater, and it’s really disappointing,” he added.
Nailed it!
Diane Wagner spoke to oppose the ordinance.
“This is about politics. It’s about an attempt to legalize discrimination and fund it with public dollars. It’s about inserting the government and the extreme views of some of our city leaders into classrooms, businesses, and bathrooms,” Wagner said. “This ordinance is about control – control over what other people’s children can learn, how teachers can teach, and even how individuals can live or express themselves.”
Karen Anderson spoke to remind the council of “their responsibility to represent everyone in this community.”
“Not just those who look like you, think like you, worship like you, and vote like you – but everyone,” Anderson said. “Public office is not about advancing personal ideology and rewarding political allies.”