A Wisconsin city that bans snowball fights is melting under the pressure of chilly coverage.
Wausau City Council President Lisa Rasmussen said negative national attention over the rarely used 1962 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.
The local police and Mayor Robert Mielke 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 the mayor in the back of the head with a snowball.
The municipal code in Wausau — which averages 56 inches of snow a year, double the national average — reads: “No person shall throw or shoot any object, arrow, stone, snowball or other missile or projectile, by hand or by any other means, at any other person.”
Barnes said the department has used the ordinance to write only 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 parking ramp — and, on two occasions, throwing snowballs at passing vehicles.
The city council will consider decriminalizing snowball fights at a meeting in January.
With Post wires