FIRST AMENDMENT V. LITTERING IN MULLICA

At the last Town Meeting an unexpected, albeit most likely orchestrated for the TV cameras, debate during public discussion seemed to have been set up by some of Mullica Republicans. Several Republicans showed up at the April 22nd meeting who seldom attend a Town Meeting to express their ire at campaign literature that had been tossed in driveways during the last several elections. First, were two of the Cheatam woman who expressed their anger about political literature that had been tossed in driveways during the school Board election by supporters of Ms. Hunt...and to demonstrate their anger they held up a bag of over 50 such items that they had collected and they demanded enforcement of Mullica's littering Ordinance.

When the Mullica solicitor attempted to explain to the two women that the existing littering Ordinance as it interacted with the First Amendment rights of free speech during elections seemed unenforceable as it lacked the necessary clarity, this upset the Republicans deeply. This resulted in the two women attempting to shout down the Mullica solicitor, Norm Zlotnick. He explained that the extant Ordinance was not clear enough and needed to be redrawn. This resulted in an outburst from the Republican Butterholf clan -- who claimed a redrafted Ordinance would just be a billing scam for the solicitor.

The explanation to the Buterholfs that with Democrat control of lawyer billing the Town lawyer had a set salary and redrawing an Ordinance, or drafting a new one resulted in no extra billing to Mullica taxpayers. This was cavalierly dismissed by old man Butterholf when he finally grasped the concept of past Republican over expenditures to connected Republican solicitors and he dismissed the savings with disdain ... that at the end of the year the result would represent no savings. HUH?

Here we are a quarter through the year and if the town continues at the present rate the savings on the solicitor's billing will be easily $20,000 over the Republican ploy that let the past hack solicitor, tim THE GIRLY MAN SHYSTER maguire run up billing... that hourly billing most years was well over $50,000 and last year totaled well over $60,000. The present solicitor has contracted to do the job for $32,000 as a set salary...that could be a really big savings for Mullica taxpayers thanks to the KEEP MULLICA GREEN team.

The littering versus First Amendment debate saw an attendee at the Town Meeting, Rudy Coia, wisely suggest that the way to resolve the conflict was to place in a redrawn littering Ordinance a proviso that so many days after an election the people who distributed campaign literature by tossing it in driveways, or on the outside of mail boxes would have to remove the uncollected literature so many days after the election. The solicitor seemed to find this an excellent suggestion and clarified that with the information that missing some literature should not subject those who distributed campaign literature from prosecution if they had made a good faith effort to pick up literature and signage that had not been removed.

This solution did not seem to resonate with the Republican Buterholf and Cheat'em clans who seemed to only be interested in scoring political points and not really looking for a rational solution that would accommodate the rights of candidates under the First Amendment to distribute their literature and the honest issue and concern of littering via the circulation of campaign literature by tossing it in residents' driveways. The solicitor Zilotnic indicated he would likely have a redrafted littering Ordinance at the next Town Meeting or the one after that.