ASK ELi: Who can legally ring your doorbell?

The question from a reader: Who can legally ring your doorbell to peddle or solicit business if you live in East Lansing?

The answer: Representatives of commercial businesses must have a permit from the City of East Lansing to appear at your door. No one is allowed to come to try to sell you new windows, gas contracts, or anything like that unless they have an active permit. The person at the door should be able to show you the permit if you ask to see it.

Representatives of non-profit organizations are, according to City Clerk Marie Wicks, “governed by the state charitable organization statute. Most such organizations do ‘register’ with [the city] by proving their non-profit status, however, they are not required to carry a permit.”

Who has active permits? In response to our asking about this issue, City staff updated the list on the City’s website and the only group on it is Clean Water Action. (Click here to see the active-permit list page.)

UPDATE: As of July 24, 2015, Clean Water Action is no longer on the list; the following groups can solicit:

• Edward Jones
• Fund For The Public Interest and Environment Michigan (PIRGIM)
• Southwestern
• Weedman
• Windows, LLC

Will putting up a “no soliciting” or “no peddling” sign save you from strangers knocking at the door? According to Wicks, “certain types of speech are protected such as religious, political, and, believe it or not, some commercial speech.” She adds that while one would hope that such signs would be respected, “I have personally received complaints that these have been disregarded.”

What’s involved in getting a solicitation permit? Says Wicks, an applicant is “required to submit fingerprints ($7.00 at the police desk), a copy of his or her driver's license and a completed application. The cost depends upon the length of time of permit duration ($5.00 per day, $20.00 per month and $50.00 per year). Additionally, there is a $5.00 per person permit cost and a $500.00 refundable surety bond requirement. The $5.00 per person charge is to cover the cost of the police background check. The process usually takes 3-5 business days.”

Is the process onerous in reality? To get the answer to this, I talked to Sean J. McBrearty,
Canvass Staff Director for Clean Water Action, which is the only group currently recognized in East Lansing as a registered canvasser. McBrearty says that compared to some city’s, East Lansing’ process is “simple, fast and transparent.” Clean Water Action gives the Clerk a current staff list, vehicle registrations for vehicles being used in a campaign, proof of their non-profit status, and a verification form.

McBrearty says, “The clerk signs the verification form, makes the police department aware of our activities, and returns the form. We make copies of the verification form and a copy is carried by each individual canvasser in the community.” By contrast, he says, “Other communities have more onerous application processes, sometimes requiring us to fill out an application that they provide, requiring applications to be notarized, and requiring individual applications for each canvasser are some of the most common complications to the process.”

Says McBrearty, “harms can result from clerks in some municipalities misunderstanding their own ordinances, and holding us to the same permitting standards that they do for private enterprises engaging in commerce. Being a non-profit participating in First Amendment speech, we are exempt from the soliciting ordinances of municipalities. This position has been held up in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, and also in the U.S. Supreme Court. In fact, Justice Thurgood Marshall held that ‘canvassing is a method of communication essential to the preservation of our free society.’"

McBrearty believes that East Lansing’s approach of verification is consistent with the democratic process: “We believe that the people of a community have the right to know who is going around and why. We work to be as transparent as possible, and the permitting process is part of a municipality's way of looking out for its citizens.”

He also appreciates the legitimacy given his organization by the official East Lansing process: “weeding out groups that are out for a quick profit and place no emphasis on training and development benefits us by limiting the amount of untrained canvassers from different organizations who may create a bad impression of canvassers and canvassing in communities.”

Why would a non-profit use a door-to-door system? According to McBrearty there are several reasons, but most especially that “a face-to-face contact about an issue is the most effective form of issue based organizing that exists. In Michigan alone CWA [Clean Water Action] has nearly 300,000 members. One of the main reasons for such a large membership is the fact that we are the only group that canvasses year-round in Michigan.”

McBrearty clearly sees door-to-door solicitation as an American tradition. He told me, “We like to point to the fact that the first door-to-door canvasser in American history was Paul Revere, who famously rode door-to-door informing citizens about the issue of an impending British attack, and organizing support in the form of arms and volunteers. We don't ask for arms while canvassing these days, but volunteers are still a great help to achieving our policy objectives!”

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Disclosure: Alice Dreger’s spouse is a donor to Clean Water Action.

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