San Diego Officials agree to sever lease with the Boy Scouts

SAN DIEGO, Calif. — The city of San Diego will sever its long-term lease with the Boys Scouts of America, which operates a camp on city-owned property in Balboa Park, after reaching a $1 million settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The settlement agreement, approved in December by the City Council on a 6-2 vote and announced Jan. 8, effectively removes the city as a defendant in the three-year-old case. The ACLU, representing a lesbian couple and an atheist family, filed suit two months after the summer 2000 landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the scouts were within their rights to ban homosexuals from the club. In the suit, the ACLU argued that the $1-a-year lease violated city and state policies banning discrimination.

Settlement negotiations began last fall after U.S. District Judge Napoleon Jones ruled in July that the lease violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

The Boy Scouts are appealing the judge’s ruling and have lashed out at the city for reaching a settlement before the appeal is heard. City officials have said that the Boy Scouts will be able to remain on the property pending the final legal outcome of the case. A ruling on a similar issue involving an aquatic center on Fiesta Island is still pending.

“Boy Scouts are disappointed the city is settling with plaintiffs so quickly, rather than defending the leases—and the constitution—in court as the Boy Scouts are doing,” a statement from the local council read. “Boy Scouts are also staggered by the amount of the settlement, which provides funding to the ACLU lawyers to continue their attack on the Boy Scouts.

“That amount would have gone a long way toward reimbursing the Boy Scouts for the tremendous investment they have made in the two properties over the years. Instead, the city leaves the Boys Scouts to fight the ACLU by themselves.”

Even so, the scouts may find a powerful ally in Washington, D.C. According to Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly, the U.S. Department of Justice may open a civil rights investigation into the settlement.

The Boys Scouts statement, released Jan. 8, alludes to similar action by the Justice Department, citing a letter written a month earlier by Eric Treene, special counsel for religious discrimination for the DOJ.

In the letter, Treene outlines his department’s concerns about the suit against the Boy Scouts.

“The city of San Diego appears to have a broad policy and practice of entering into mutally beneficial, arms-length contracts with nonprofit groups with the goal of increasing city resources available to the general public,” Treene wrote. “A holding that a city’s decision to include the Boy Scouts in a broad-based program such as this violates the Establishment Clause raises substantial concerns. Indeed singling out the Boy Scouts for exclusion from such a program based on their viewpoint would raise serious First Amendment concerns.”

Treene went on to say that the “civil rights division has an interest in participating in cases of this nature.”

A call to the Justice Department was not returned.

Officials from the Boy Scouts maintain that since its policies were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the scouts are the true victims of discrimination.

“The Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals have made it clear that an organization may not be excluded from a government program because of its values,” the Boy Scout statement read. “Plaintiffs’ lawsuit asks the city to treat Boy Scouts differently (than) more than 100 other nonprofit lessees.”

Published by Keener Communications Group, February 2004

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