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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 17, 2019)
A5 THE ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2019 Boeing to halt Washington state assembly lines Production of 737 MAX on hold By DOMINIC GATES Seattle Times Nine months after the Federal Aviation Admin- istration grounded the 737 MAX, Boeing fi nally pulled the plug on the jet’s produc- tion Monday. The company announced it’s temporarily halting the assembly lines in Renton from January, with no timeline defi ned for a restart. However, there is good news for the 12,000-strong Renton workforce: Boeing will preserve their jobs by keeping some on 737 work and redeploying the rest to other facilities in the region. “During this time, it is our plan that affected employees will continue 737-related work, or be temporarily assigned to other teams in Puget Sound,” Boeing said in a statement. “As we have throughout the 737 MAX Mike Siegel/Seattle Times The Boeing 737 factory in Renton is the fi nal assembly facility for all Boeing 737s. grounding, we will keep our customers, employees, and supply chain top of mind as we continue to assess appro- priate actions.” The company said that during the slowdown in pro- duction over the past nine months, it’s been able to fi x issues with the production system and allow suppliers that were lagging to catch up, and it intends to have some employees working on efforts to sustain those gains. A Boeing insider briefed on the decision said the Renton factory’s manufac- turing operation is Boeing’s “crown jewel,” he said. “It’s an amazing facility. You try to keep the team together as best you can. They all still have jobs.” “I think it’s the right thing to do,” he added. “We care about our workforce.” The insider said Boeing didn’t announce any time- line for the production stop- page because it has no con- trol over the jet’s return to service. “The FAA has a lot more control than we do,” he said. “When it’s time to get back, we will.” Though Boeing had been hoping for approval to fl y the MAX again by year end, last week FAA Administra- tor Steve Dickson pushed that expectation into next year and told Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg to back away from public statements suggesting otherwise. Offi cials privately iden- tifi ed mid-February as the new target for FAA clear- ance. Assuming no further slips in the schedule, that still extends the MAX’s grounding to almost a year. The MAX was grounded worldwide on March 13 fol- lowing two fatal crashes in just over four months killed 346 people. The decision was fi nal- ized at a meeting of the com- pany’s board in Chicago. With the stoppage in Renton, parts of the 737 supply chain may also grind to a halt, which is very dis- ruptive to the fi nely tuned global production system. Anticipating Boeing’s announcement, the mar- ket slammed the jetmaker’s share price Monday even as the Dow reached a record high. The stock fell nearly $15, or 4.29% for the day, closing at $327. Ruling that protects homeless people sleeping on sidewalks stands By DAVID G. SAVAGE Los Angeles Times The Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a major case on homelessness, letting stand a ruling that protects homeless people’s right to sleep on the side- walk or in public parks if no other shelter is available. The justices without com- ment or a dissent said that they would not hear the case from Boise, which chal- lenged a ruling by a federal appeals court. The outcome is a signif- icant victory for homeless activists and a setback for city offi cials in California and other Western states who argued the appeals court rul- ing undercut their authority to regulate encampments on the sidewalks. Lawyers for the home- less had argued it was cruel and wrong to punish people who have nowhere else to sleep at night. They won a major victory last year when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that pros- ecuting people for sleep- ing on the sidewalks vio- lated the 8th Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The appeals court ruling extended to California and eight other western states, and said a city ordinance “violates the 8th Amendment insofar as it imposes crimi- nal sanctions against home- less individuals for sleeping outdoors on public property, when no alternative shelter is available to them.” The legal case had arisen a decade before when Rob- ert Martin and several other homeless people were given tickets or fi nes of between $25 and $75 for camping on the sidewalk. They then joined a lawsuit that chal- lenged the punishments as unconstitutional. A large group of West Coast cities including Los Angeles had urged the Supreme Court to hear the appeal in City of Boise vs. Martin. They said the “creation of a de facto constitutional right to live on sidewalks and in parks will cripple the ability of more than 1,600 municipalities in the 9th Cir- cuit to maintain the health and safety of their commu- nities,” wrote lawyers for Boise. “Nothing in the Consti- tution … requires cities to surrender their streets, side- walks, parks, riverbeds and other public areas to vast encampments,” the lawyers said. The appeal was fi led by Theane Evangelis and Ted Olson, partners at Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles. A right to sleep on the sidewalk is not new for Los Angeles or city offi cials. In 2006, the 9th Circuit handed down a similar ruling that said the city may not enforce laws against sleeping in public places. Rather than appeal, the city negotiated a settlement with lawyers for the homeless in which it agreed to not enforce such laws from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. The Supreme Court has previously relied on the 8th Amendment to limit the pun- ishment for some crimes, but it is rare for judges to strike down a criminal law itself as cruel and unusual punish- ment. The 9th Circuit cited a 1962 decision in Robin- son vs. California which struck down part of a state law that “made the status of narcotic addiction a criminal offense.” Judge Marsha Berzon said this principle extends to homelessness. “Just as the state may not criminalize the state of being homeless in public places,” she wrote, “the state may not crim- inalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless — namely sitting, lying or sleeping on the streets.” Los Angeles City Attor- ney Michael Feuer had urged the court to hear the Boise case and review the 9th Cir- cuit’s opinion. “The lack of clarity of the Boise decision, combined with its sweeping rationale, makes more diffi - cult the efforts of Los Ange- les to balance the needs of its homeless residents with the needs of everyone who uses our public spaces,” he said. 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