East Lampeter Township proposed hotel ordinance not unusual but must not be used to violate right to privacy

By Robert Field

Headline in LNP’s print edition “Sex for sale on the Route 30 corridor: How one suburb is cracking down” goes on to report:

“East Lampeter Township, home to half of all the hotel rooms in Lancaster County, is seeking ways to crack down on drug dealing, prostitution and other criminal activities that have become more common in the establishments.
“Police and elected officials in the suburb, a popular tourist destination, are weighing a law that would require hotel operators to maintain detailed records on everyone who stays in any of the 2,900 rooms there — or face a $1,000 fine.
“The proposal has support from law enforcement officials including the district attorney, Craig Stedman. ‘It’s a common sense change. It would deter some activity and I think this would be a very positive thing,’ he said.”

The proposed ordinance requires the same information that is routinely collected by most branded hotels: Name, address, date of arrival and departure, room, and method of payment. No problem here.

What the Township officials and District Attorney must not be allowed to do is to routinely review hotel registries. Who stays at a hotel and what they are doing isn’t any of their business, unless they have reason to suspect someone is performing a criminal activity. In that case they should get an order from a judge to require the hotel to provide information on the suspect… and on the suspected party only.

A sister company to NewsLanc operates a hotel at the Newark, NJ airport. During the years following the 911 tragedy, officials asked to routinely review the registries of guests. We respectfully declined. We told them to get a court order and we would gladly oblige. We heard no more about the matter.
However, our company policy provided for an exception to the rule. If the authorities had an emergency situation where they had reason to have significant concern, we would bend our rules. We considered this like the right of police to cross jurisdictional lines in “hot pursuit.”

This has not happened at the hotel but it did at an apartment complex. Our staff even bravely helped in the arrest of a visiting suspected murderer.
We must not ‘throw the baby out with the wash.’ Our predecessors fought long and hard to protect the citizenry from undue government surveillance. We will resist an Orwelian ‘1984’ type police state.

When you stay at one of our properties, ‘Big brothers’ will not be watching you.

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1 Comment

  1. If law and township officials are determined to conduct surveillance on the hotel industry, they better include all townships along with Lancaster City; after all, they don’t want to be accused of discrimination, do they????

    George Orwell is alive and doing well.

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