This past week the Boy Scouts of America and their local overseeing body, the Desert Pacific Council, added new civil rights claims to their lawsuit against the City of San Diego, alleging that the city is harassing Scouts and Scout leaders who are using the property leased to them on Fiesta Island. The Scouts are claiming that city employees have recently singled them out for mistreatment at Camp Balboa, which they lease from the city, and on the adjacent city parkland.

Last month the Boy Scouts of America filed suit against the City of San Diego in federal court, in an effort to stop the city from terminating an agreement that allows them to lease 18 acres of land in Balboa Park for $1 a year – the sort of arrangement usually reserved for public, not religious, organizations. The Scouts have bypassed nondiscrimination laws that would prevent them from banning openly gay and lesbian Scout leaders and volunteers, with the claim that they are a religious organization.

In the most recent claims, the Scouts accuse the city of writing thousands of dollars of parking tickets, photographing the Scout’s vehicles and selective enforcement of city regulations against the Scouts.

“By its harassment of Scouts and Scout leaders, the city is further violating the Scouts’ rights,” said Merrilee A. Boyack, a spokeswoman for the Desert Pacific Council, in a news release. “The city sold out Boy Scouts by settling with the ACLU over Camp Balboa, and now the city is harassing Scouts using the parkland at Fiesta Island.”

In January, the San Diego City Council voted to abandon a lawsuit that the city had been participating in with the Scouts against the ACLU, who had alleged the lease violated the federal and state constitutions and the city’s own Human Dignity Ordinance, which forbids the city from the entering into contracts with organizations that discriminate based on sexual orientation. In a 6-2 council vote the city agreed to pay $790,000 of the ACLU’s legal fees, $160,000 in court costs, in order to get out of the suit.

The Scouts immediately retaliated with a lawsuit specifically naming council members Donna Frye, Ralph Inzunza, Scott Peters, Michael Zucchet, Charles Lewis and Deputy Mayor Toni Atkins who voted to approve the settlement with the ACLU.

City Attorney Casey Gwinn responded to the original lawsuit saying, “Very often you read a complaint and say it’s a close call or it’s an arguable issue. This looks like a public relations document. It does not look like a lawsuit. It’s not even a close call.”

In addition to asking the U.S. District Court to stop the city from terminating the 2001 Camp Balboa lease and block the city’s settlement with the ACLU, the Scouts are now asking the court to force the city to cease harassing Desert Pacific Council members on Fiesta Island.

The Scouts point out that a memorandum from the city attorney’s office dated Sept. 17, 1999, states that “the ACLU’s contentions have no merit” and “there is no basis upon which the City may lawfully terminate the Leases” even if the city assumed that Scouting is a “religious organization.”

Gwinn has since said that the city pulled out of the lawsuit because the Scouts admitted in court that they were indeed a religious organization. That formed the grounds for a July 2003 ruling by Judge Napoleon Jones, Jr., that said the City of San Diego acted improperly when it leased land in the parks to the Scouts because it amounted to an endorsement of the Scouts’ “inherently religious programs and practices.”