City’s costs approach nearly $700,000 in homeless lawsuit

An unidentified homeless man sleeps in a parking lot with the Marion County Judicial Center and the Golden-Collum Memorial Federal Building and United States Courthouse shown a block away near the intersection of Northwest First Avenue and Northwest Third Street in Ocala, Fla. on Monday, July 20, 2020. The homeless people who stay and live in the parking lot have become a familiar sight recently in downtown Ocala. Many of the homeless say that drug dealers come and drive up to deal in the parking lot and that the Ocala Police Department ignores the problem. [Bruce Ackerman/Ocala Gazette] 2020.

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Posted September 28, 2021 | By Carlos Medina, carlos@ocalagazette.com

Ocala must pay nearly $400,000 in fees and costs to attorneys who brought a case against the city’s open lodging ordinance in September 2019.

But the damage could have been worse had the court not cut the amount by nearly half.

The ACLU of Florida and Southern Legal Counsel (SLC) claimed they accrued more than $1.16 million in fees and costs. They were seeking more than $780,000 in reimbursement, according to a June motion filed in the U.S. Middle District of Florida.

But in his order on Aug. 31, U.S. District Judge James Moody reduced that amount to $392,129.58.

That does not include the more than $270,000 the city incurred in its costs and attorney’s fees.

On Sept. 16, the Ocala City Council unanimously agreed to pay the plaintiff’s attorney’s fees and costs and bring the case to an end.

Patrick Gilligan, city attorney, said he felt the amount awarded was still too high but noted it was probably the best they could do.

“We can appeal it. I don’t recommend that. I don’t see us prevailing on appeal,” he said.

However, Gilligan then explained why he advised the city to fight the lawsuit in the first place.

In 2009, six homeless people bought a similar case against the city of Boise. In Martin v. Boise, the plaintiffs challenged the city’s ordinance against sleeping on public property. In 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the ruling that the ordinance violated the Eight Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

According to Gilligan, he sided with the belief that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn the decision.

“A lot of people, myself included, thought this is going to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they are going to say this is bogus,” Gilligan said. “I didn’t think it would pass muster.”

However, that gamble backfired when in December 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal on the case.

“It’s kind of the law of the land until somehow, someway it gets to one of the other circuits and the Supreme Court takes cert on it,” he said.

In February, Judge Moody ruled Ocala’s ordinance, which allowed police to arrest homeless people for sleeping in public, was unconstitutional, mainly based on the Martin v. Boise case. The city eventually changed the ordinance to comply with the judge’s order.

Moody ruled, without the need of a trial, that arresting homeless people without first checking if there is room at area homeless shelters is cruel and unusual punishment violating the Eighth Amendment. He also ruled issuing trespass warnings without a process for appeal violated the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.

Gilligan said the changes to the ordinance did not stop police from enforcing the intent of the law, which was to stop people from sleeping in the open.

“It really isn’t that big of a deal. We’ve got to do a jump and make sure there’s available bed space,” Gilligan said. “We’re doing that.”