This is, indeed, the maturity level that one has come to expect from Democratic candidates these days:
On June 27, former Colorado Speaker of the House Andrew Romanoff oversaw a group of volunteers chalking the sidewalk of the government district office of U.S. Representative Mike Coffman in protest over immigration issues. The political protest ended when the building manager, Quyet Dang, arrived in the parking lot and told the crew if they didn’t clean up the chalk he would call the police. The chalking ended almost immediately, but the cleanup took 15-30 minutes, or even longer than that according to some sources. Regardless of how long the cleanup lasted, the tapes show Romanoff leaving before it is finished.
It’s not so much that Andrew Romanoff wrote on the sidewalk with chalk. That’s vaguely immature and silly, yes, but people do do that. What fascinates is that Romanoff thinks that other people need to clean up the messes that he makes. I will concede that this is a common attitude for Democratic politicians to make; but you’d think that the DCCC would have vetted their candidate pool to make sure that they didn’t have anybody without sufficient mother-wit to display this attitude in public.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: I’m not saying that Andrew Romanoff should go to jail. I do think that if you draw with chalk on somebody’s sidewalk, and they come to complain… you don’t leave the cleanup to underlings. Own your own immaturity; paradoxically, it’s the adult thing to do.
I don’t know, I’m more concerned that you can get arrested or ticketed for writing on the sidewalk in chalk (assuming it wasn’t vulgar or profane).
Seeing as it was Democratic protesters, I’d guess that the odds are fairly good that it was profane and/or vulgar, though.
Depends on who owns the sidewalk. Most of ’em are on private property, even if the city does (or contracts out) the installation.
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Mew
I would assume that in most cases with sidewalks on private property, there is actually a public easement that allows the sidewalk to be used by the public. It’s the same way that my own private property technically extends to the centerline of the road (it really does!), but I’m not allowed to shoo people off the northbound lane. (There are actually two easements on my land, one extending from the centerline of the road back 30′ and another toward the back of the property where some electrical lines run (I’m not allowed to mess with those, apparently)).
Yes, there is an easement, for purposes of traveling through the space, but that doesn’t permit using the space for advertising or other forms of public speechifying. That’s up to you as property owner.
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Mew
CNN gets protestors sometimes, and they make the protestors stand on the viaduct side of the grout that separates the viaduct from CNN’s sidewalk.
I find that odd (I’m obviously not familiar with sidewalk law). I figured you could do treat a sidewalk as a public space, sort of like a property owner isn’t allowed to interfere with a navigable stream that runs through his property.
The owner isn’t allowed to interfere with those “navigating” (traveling through) the space .. but someone who stops traveling and starts scrawling messages the owner disagrees with .. the owner can object to.
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Mew