Barre’s mayor has decided the city shouldn’t continue its fight to bar individuals with certain criminal convictions from living within most parts of the city.

Bowing to a recent ruling from the Vermont Superior Court striking down a sex offender residency restriction ordinance,

Mayor Thomas Lauzon told the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus that an appeal would be “a waste of time and money.”

It’s the first time the mayor has acknowledged the difficulty in continuing to press an idea he first brought to the city council last year. Barre was the first Vermont municipality to enact a local law restricting where sex offenders — even those successfully integrated back into the community — could or could not live.

Several other municipalities have followed suit, but the legality of all of the ordinances is also up in the air.

Superior Court Judge Helen Toor accepted the argument made by the ACLU-Vermont that Vermont municipalities have limited authority in passing ordinances as expansive as those restricting an individual’s housing choices.

Lauzon’s first reaction after Toor’s ruling was to continue to fight. Two routes seemed possible: an appeal of Toor’s ruling to the Vermont Supreme Court, or approval from the Legislature for the city to enact the ordinance.

But state legislator Rep. Paul Poirier, who also serves on Barre’s city council, told Lauzon the Legislature was unlikely to grant approval.

Indeed, strong language against residency restrictions was included in one of the two sex offender bills passed by the Legislature earlier this year.

Legislative leaders believe such restrictions are simply “bad public policy,” Poirier told Lauzon.

So Lauzon says he’ll recommend to the city council that it drop the ordinance. Instead, city officials’ time can better be spent “pursuing an expansion of the sex offender registry,” he argued.

Such an expansion — of the registry of sex offenders posted on the Web — has actually already been enacted by the Legislature. It goes into effect Oct. 1.

Ironically, just as the Legislature concluded this year that residency restrictions don’t work, a legislative study committee concluded in 2005 that there’s no evidence online registries work, either. Nonetheless, as many as a thousand more offenders — some whose crimes go back to the 1970s and 1980s — will be added to the registry, according to provisions worked out by the Legislature.

(A good many of the additional names will be marked “presumed to be high risk to reoffend” even though the state has never assessed their chance to commit another crime. Risk assessments are a relatively recent development. Individuals whose offenses are longer ago than about 15 years are unlikely to have been assessed. They will have to pay to have a risk assessment done if they want a chance to have the “danger” presumption removed.)

The complete language in S. 13 (passed in March 2009) on residency restrictions is:

Sec. 51. Local Community Sex Offender Residency Restrictions

(a) Some local communities in Vermont have recently enacted or debated local ordinances that are designed to prevent sexual violence against children by restricting where registered sex offenders can live. These restrictions usually prohibit a sex offender from living within a certain distance of a school, park, playground, or child care facility.

(b) The general assembly is very concerned that such policies could have a negative impact on public safety in our rural state by isolating offenders or driving them underground. Densely populated towns and city centers that have ordinances push offenders out into more rural communities where there are fewer opportunities for successful community reintegration and law enforcement supervision. Sex offender compliance with the state registry is currently over 99 percent, and the general assembly believes that keeping this high rate is essential to public safety.

(c) According to sex offender management experts, research has shown that sex offender residency restrictions are unlikely to deter sex offenders from committing new crimes and should not be considered a viable public safety strategy. While residency restrictions are intended to reduce sex crimes against children by strangers, 90 percent of such crimes are committed by a relative or family friend.

(d) Therefore, the general assembly respectfully requests that the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, Inc. work proactively with local communities to ensure they are receiving accurate and substantive information about the lack of efficacy of such laws and to encourage communities to focus on prevention and other strategies to improve community safety.

The language in the 2005 legislative Sex Offender Supervision and Community Notification Study Report on the effectiveness of sex offender registries is:

Currently, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether posting information about registered sex offenders on the internet is a valuable and effective public safety tool; however, the general assembly determined through passage of Act 157 that the majority of the public feels that the internet registry provides important information that can be used to protect families and expects such information to be a matter of public record.

Court papers in the case Hagan v. Barre can be found at http://www.acluvt.org/issues/barre_lawsuit.php