Wisconsin city mulls dumping old ban on throwing snowballs

WAUSAU,
Wis. (AP) — For decades, those who have participated in snowball fights
in one Wisconsin city have risked getting in trouble with the law. But
that may be about to change.

A 1962 ban on throwing projectiles
in Wausau lumps snowballs into the same category as rocks and other
items that can cause serious harm.

City Council President Lisa
Rasmussen said that recent negative national attention over the rarely
used ordinance has raised questions about whether it could be time to
take snowballs off the naughty list.

“Maybe it’s worth giving a
look to see if that list could be amended, to mitigate that odd news
story that keeps coming up like a bad penny,” Rasmussen said.

Wausau police and the mayor even made a video showing officers having a snowball fight.

“A
fun snowball fight is a fun snowball fight,” Deputy Chief Matt Barnes
says in the video, “and that’s not something (for which) we enforce this
ordinance.”

The video ends with Barnes clocking Wausau Mayor Robert Mielke in the back of the head with a snowball.

Barnes said the department has used the ordinance to write about 10 tickets in the last 15 years, according to Wisconsin Public Radio News.
The citations included cases of people shooting crossbows into a
neighbor’s yard, dropping sandbags off the roof of a downtown parking
ramp and, on two occasions, throwing snowballs at passing cars.

The City Council will consider decriminalizing snowball fights at a meeting next month.