City Attorney: Pier is a Park-- So No Guns Allowed

City Attorney Mike Webb said his office has determined that the pier is indeed considered a park, and so those planning to walk the pier tomorrow with non concealed handguns will be in violation of the law.

Although openly carrying firearms is legal in California, the city recently updated its municipal code to ban any kind of gun in parks other than for police.

On Thursday Webb said he came to the determination that the pier is considered a park based on the designation on page 3-117 in a city document called The Recreation and Parks Element for the City from 2004 to 2014.

"It's a misdemeanor to carry a firearm onto the pier other than the parking spaces or the commercial spaces," Webb said, "but I don't think you can get to the commercial spaces without going through the park so essentially it's just the parking spaces."

Pro gun activists part of the South Bay Open Carry plan to meet and shop at the pier tomorrow at 10 a.m. with unloaded handguns holstered to their waist. There was a breakdown in communication between city officials and the South Bay Open Carry founder Harley Green last week when the city asked Green to postpone the demonstration to allow for further planning. But Green refused, saying the city should allow citizens to demonstrate their rights in public without any planning.

Although Green did not respond to a request to comment for this story, he and others are skeptical that the Redondo Beach Pier is in fact a park. Instead, they say it's a shopping center.

The city's municipal code was updated to outlaw firearms in parks on May 18. Police Chief Joe Leonardi said the city has been working on making the ordinance update for two years in response to paintball guns in Veterans Park and elsewhere, mostly on holidays. It was one of 22 new ordinances recently adopted and modeled on other cities' laws, including LA County's.

The private company responsible for publishing the city's municipal code manual has not placed the updated ordinances into the manual yet. Section 4-35.20 can found through a  "code alert" link at the top of the web page for 4-35.01.

Charles Nichols, a reporter with the Los Angeles Examiner and lifelong proponent and activist for Open Carry, said it's worth noting that there's no language in the city ordinance itself designating the commercially zoned pier shopping center as a park.

"Nor has the city provided any other example of a commercially zoned shopping center which has been designated a 'park' in the entire state of California," Nichols said.

Webb, however, said 4-35.01(a) states that land designated by the city as parkland or open space is a park, and that does include the pier based on the parks department document.

Officers tomorrow will have a choice to arrest anyone with handguns on the pier, or to write them a citation, Leonardi said. Officers will also have the option to write a report and send it to the city prosecutor's office by way of complaint and allow the city prosecutor to choose whether or not to prosecute.

Leonardi said all options for officers will be on the table for tomorrow's event, but added, "Each case is different, but we would handle it in a way to where it could go to the city prosecutor."

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