Accord reached on July protests

The city of Boston has agreed to speed up its consideration of protest permits for the Democratic National Convention, as part of a legal settlement reached yesterday with a coalition of antiabortion groups.

Under the settlement, protest permits will be processed within 15 days, instead of the open-ended time frame in the city's original guidelines that could have meant that protest groups would wait a month or more for approvals. The city also agreed to allow all groups of 20 or fewer to protest without permits, as long as their demonstrations don't interfere with pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

In addition, starting July 10, about two weeks before the convention, protest applications submitted to respond to suddenly emerging events will be processed within two business days.

A wide range of groups have already filed protest applications with the city. Among them are antiwar organizations, groups clamoring for more liberal social policies, antiauthoritarians, the antiabortion groups that filed the lawsuit, and Boston's main police union, which is working without a contract.

Only a handful of protest applications have been approved, including ones filed by ANSWER Boston, the Bl(A)ck Tea Society, and Falun Dafa, but city officials said yesterday they did not have details of event locations and times.

Popular protest locations include City Hall Plaza, Boston Common, Copley Square, and sites in the vicinity of the FleetCenter, where the convention will be held. The faster processing of applications will ensure that more groups have their say during the convention, said Brian Chavez-Ochoa, a lawyer for the Christian Defense Coalition, the lead plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that led to the settlement.

"The city took very seriously the need to protect the First Amendment," he said. "This gives us concrete time limits. Obviously, we're very excited and pleased."

But while yesterday's settlement eliminates one legal challenge to the city's protest plans, others are still possible. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild remain concerned that the settlement keeps intact a new step in the permit process added specifically for convention week. That new step requires that the permit be reviewed by the city's Office of Consumer Affairs and Licensing at the end of the process, and the lawyers fear that will give the city a chance to block the request at the last minute.

In addition, the guidelines still give city officials wide discretion to reject applications, said Urszula Masny-Latos, executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Under the new guidelines, applications can be turned down if city officials determine that an event would pose "unreasonable danger to the health and safety" of the public, among other reasons.

"Maybe this coalition is satisfied, but we are not," Masny-Latos said. The National Lawyers Guild plans to challenge the city's permitting guidelines in court if any applications are rejected, she said.

In addition, the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU have raised concerns about a proposed protest area that convention planners are setting aside for those who want to demonstrate within earshot of the delegates. Though a revised plan for that zone would provide much more space, the area is currently full of mud and twisted metal, raising safety concerns, Masny-Latos said.

Merita A. Hopkins, Boston's corporation counsel, said she is confident that the tighter timeline in the revised guidelines will answer critics' concerns. The city is also happy to rectify the issues raised by the defense coalition, she said, insisting that the city's goal has been to make it easy for groups wanting to protest around the time of the convention.

"There's a number of things that they highlighted to us that we hadn't considered," Hopkins said. "Protecting the First Amendment has been one of our priorities from the beginning."

In April, the city issued a new set of guidelines for protesters, in effect only from July 24 to Aug. 1, when thousands of protesters are expected to come to the city in conjuction with Boston's first national political convention. As originally proposed in April, applications for public events during the convention would first be processed by the Office of Consumer Affairs and Licensing, which could take as long as 14 days. Then the applicants would take their paperwork to individual departments for authorization. When that process was complete, they would be required to return to Consumer Affairs and Licensing for final approval.Officials said the guidelines would help ease the process for those unfamiliar with city government and aid the city in keeping tabs on demonstrations. But the guidelines were criticized as overly cumbersome, and civil-liberties groups said they were concerned that the guidelines would be used to prevent some groups from voicing their opinions. In exchange for the antiabortion groups agreeing to drop their lawsuit, the city signed off on a number of concessions. It agreed that the first step for protesters, an application to the city's Consumer Affairs and Licensing Department, would take no more than seven days to process, instead of as many as 14 under the guidelines issued in April.

The next step, in which individual city agencies review permit applications, will be finished within five business days, instead of an open-ended time frame. The last step, final approval by Consumer Affairs and Licensing, will take three business days, again putting a deadline on a process that had previously lacked one.

The city will also seek to move more quickly in the weeks leading up to the convention, to accommodate groups seeking to protest an unforeseen issue, or picket outside an event that is announced late. But Hopkins said it's not yet clear how that will work in all instances, since the expedited processing is intended only for "spontaneous demonstrations," not groups that have dragged their feet regarding applying for permits.

Planned protests at events that are publicly known before July 10 won't count as spontaneous and therefore won't qualify for the two-business-day turnaround, she said. It has not been determined how the city will identify the unforeseen events that would prompt protesters to ask for a permit.

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said that now that guidelines are in place, her group and others will be watching carefully to make sure no one is prevented from having his or her say.

"We'll have to see how it plays out in practice," Rose said.

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.