Harbor Community Church has filed a federal religious freedom lawsuit against Ventura over the city ordering the church to shut down its contentious homeless program, Interim City Attorney Juli Scott said Friday.
Scott said the city was served Thursday with a copy of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in downtown Los Angeles. Individual defendants named in the suit include City Manager Mark Watkins and Community Development Director Jeff Lambert, Scott said.
The suit seeks preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the city from requiring the church to obtain a conditional-use permit to operate its Operation Embrace program, she said. A hearing is scheduled for June 16.
Harbor Pastor Sam Gallucci did not return a call seeking comment Friday. Neither did the church’s lawyer, James Sonne, director of the Religious Liberty Clinic at Stanford Law School. Sonne did email a copy of the lawsuit to The Star.
Scott said the lawsuit argues that the church’s First Amendment freedom of religion rights were violated by the city requiring it to obtain a conditional-use permit for the program. For more than five years, Operation Embrace had provided meals, showers and religious worship to a mostly homeless population.
The lawsuit also argues that Ventura’s land-use restrictions substantially burdened the church’s exercise of religion and thereby violated the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, Scott said.
The city will vigorously fight the lawsuit, she said.
“It’s a tough issue, but we think we have a good factual basis to defend it,” she said. “We disagree with their basic argument that they don’t even need a conditional-use permit, that they have a right to provide these services as part of their religious mission.
“It’s certainly not an absolute right,” she added.
The midtown church pulled the plug on its homeless program Wednesday, two days after the City Council let stand an earlier decision by the Planning Commission to deny the church a conditional-use permit. In general, commissioners felt the program wasn’t appropriate for its location in a residential neighborhood next to an elementary school, park and day care facility. Residents had waged a campaign against the program for years, arguing it posed a threat to their safety.
Harbor, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Ventura and the Ventura Interfaith Ministerial Association filed separate appeals that argued planning commissioners had violated the church’s religious freedoms. But the council on Monday deadlocked 2-2 on whether to uphold the commission’s decision, and on a related motion, thus leaving the denial of the permit intact.
Scott said the lawsuit caught the city off guard.
She said Gallucci stated in an email he sent to the city Thursday morning that he was going to consult with church elders on Friday to decide whether the church would sue.
“And so it was a little bit of a surprise, I guess you could say, that it was filed so quickly,” she said. “We’re disappointed.”
The city has retained the Los Angeles office of law firm Burke, Williams & Sorensen to represent it in the lawsuit, she said.
Read more: http://www.vcstar.com/news/2014/may/16/harbor-church-sues-ventura-over-closure-of/#ixzz31wIK7KwO
- vcstar.com
No comments:
Post a Comment