Over the past 10 plus years the City of St. Augustine has slowly eroded the rights of individuals in deference to business profits in the "historic" downtown areas. It is now at a point that singing is illegal in La Plaza de la Constitucion, as is the exercise of many First Amendment Rights. The Plaza has been the public gathering place in the nation's oldest (European) city since it was founded. We are determined to return the use of the Plaza to the people.
For more than 10 years the common areas in St. Augustine, Florida have been disappearing, as has the ability of taxpaying citizens to freely exercise their constitutionally guaranteed civil rights on these publicly-owned lands. These miscarriages of justice are due directly to the City's cowardly capitulation to the business industry, valuing its dominion over the basic rights of human beings.
Every American town has a public square. St. Augustine's La Plaza de la Constitucion was once used to sell human beings into slavery. Now, artists cannot sell their work on this same land, people cannot gather without a permit, and, as with the slaves, public singing is prohibited!
The two most commonly accepted and used definitions of the word 'common' are:
1. belonging equally to, or shared alike by, two or more or all in question; common property, common interests.
2. pertaining to or belonging equally to an entire community, nation, or culture; public, a common language or history, a common water supply system.
Common areas belong to the people, not to the local business elite and their puppet city commissioners. Legislating against any legal form of human activity and protected civil rights in these areas is unconstitutional.
We demand our public commons be used to promote the common welfare and be returned to the people by the immediate rescission of all city ordinances prohibiting any form of legal human expression such as art, dancing, singing, making music and speeches, peaceful assembly and protesting abuses of government.
Common areas belong to the people, not to the business community.
