Politicians like to say they support a free press. We’ll find out Tuesday night (April 28) if anybody on the Menlo Park City Council actually believes in the First Amendment.
Council will vote on a list of new and increased fees, and slipped into the 245-page document is a requirement that newspapers pay $373 for each rack. For a paper with 25 racks, that would be a $9,325 hit.
Renewing a permit would cost $233 per year for each rack.
If a newspaper wanted to dispute these fees, the city would charge it $373.
Put another way, Menlo Park wants to start charging people to exercise their constitutional rights. How long before the city slaps a tax on people who want to exercise their right to free speech, or to peaceably assemble?
The council is looking to impose this news rack fee, along with hundreds of other new fees or increases, because the state has reduced how much car tax money the city gets.
If the city needs to save some money, it could eliminate its “public engagement manager,” Kendra Calvert, who made $156,923 in 2024, according to the government salary tracking website Transparent California. With benefits, her compensation was $250,325.
That’s a lot of money for a PR person.
Cutting her job would result in a savings much greater than the revenue the city would get from news rack fees.
But city governments rarely look at saving money — they focus on raising taxes and fees.
The city calls this a “fee for service,” but the city won’t be providing any service to newspapers. The newspapers purchase and maintain the news racks. The newspaper is available to readers at no charge. Yet the city wants to charge us for providing a free product. Can you tax something that’s free?
If approved tonight, Menlo Park would become the first Mid-Peninsula city to charge such a fee.
Local newspapers are typically small businesses. These fees are prohibitive. They’ll make a paper consider the idea of dropping distribution and news coverage in Menlo Park. After all, newspapers usually don’t have to pay a fee to exercise their First Amendment rights. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
If council members really support a free press, they should drop these fees.
Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.
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