Political Signs=Pollution?

I got a comment the other day from Benjamin Gatti in response to my post about North Carolina’s plans to sue the Tennessee Valley Authority over interstate air pollution.

For readers unfamiliar with Gatti, some background: He ran for a seat on Lake Park, N.C.’s council in 2003 on a platform to develop public space, complete a walking corridor and help local residents start micro-businesses. But he was arrested days before the election, accused of paying teens to remove from public property political signs, which Gatti considers a form of pollution. He was charged with misdemeanor counts of contributing to the delinquency of juveniles and “injuring notices and advertisements.” He also lost the election.

In his comment, Gatti mentions Los Angeles v. Taxpayers for Vincent. That was a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the city’s right to remove political campaign signs from public property. The case was sparked when municipal workers, armed with a city law banning posting on public property, removed council candidate Roland Vincent’s signs from utility poles. Charging that the law was an unconstitutional limit on free speech rights, Vincent sued in District Court and won. An appellate court upheld the decision.

The Supreme Court, however, sided with the city. “Public property which is not by tradition or designation a forum for public communication may be reserved by the State ‘for its intended purposes, communicative or otherwise, as long as the regulation on speech is reasonable and not an effort to suppress expression merely because public officials oppose the speaker's view,’” Justice Stevens wrote for the court’s majority. “Given our analysis of the legitimate interest served by the ordinance, its viewpoint neutrality, and the availability of alternative channels of communication, the ordinance is certainly constitutional as applied to appellees under this standard.”

The other case Gatti brings up, which is actually Major Media of the Southeast Inc. v. City of Raleigh, is one of many decisions that have upheld the constitutionality of billboard amortization. This was a hot issue during the last session of the N.C. General Assembly, when the billboard industry pushed for a law requiring taxpayers to compensate owners forced by local governments to take down signs. The measure passed, but Gov. Mike Easley vetoed it. Lawmakers then approved a revised version allowing communities to continue existing amortization programs, which allow local governments to order a sign’s removal as long as they compensate owners by letting them keep it up for a time.

I sympathize with people who view billboards and campaign signs as an aesthetic affront. After all, I wouldn’t want my home to overlook some corporation’s garish and possibly even morally offensive marketing materials, nor do I particularly enjoy seeing political advertisements cluttering the roadsides, especially after the election. However, given the extreme threats facing our natural world – life-and-death matters such as climate change, toxic pollution, forest loss, species extinction – battling over signs doesn’t seem to me to be the wisest expenditure of environmentalists’ time and energy.