by TRC_Admin | Oct 30, 2021 | Billboards, Legal
“A tax levied by the city of Cincinnati on billboard companies in an effort to close a budget shortfall is an unconstitutional of First Amendment rights to free speech, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
Justice Sharon Kennedy, writing the court’s unanimous opinion, said the companies, as publishers of speech, can’t be singled out for engaging in protected expression. She also noted that because of various exceptions, the tax applied mainly to two companies.
Those businesses, Lamar Advertising and Norton Outdoor Advertising, indicated the tax would require them to remove less profitable billboards, which has the effect of limiting protected speech, Kennedy said.
“That the tax involves billboards rather than the institutional press is of no consequence, and strict scrutiny applies,” Kennedy said.
Cincinnati imposed the tax three years ago to raise $709,000 to help cover a $2.5 million budget shortfall. The city argued unsuccessfully that the tax was only a commercial transaction and didn’t target billboard messages.”
— Cincinnati.com, The Enquirer
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by TRC_Admin | Oct 30, 2021 | Billboards, Legal
SCOTUSblog has been maintaining an ongoing list of various proceedings and orders on their site leading up to November 10 argument:
“Whether the Austin city code’s distinction between on-premise signs, which may be digitized, and off-premise signs, which may not, is a facially unconstitutional content-based regulation under Reed v. Town of Gilbert.”
— SCOTUSblog
To track proceedings and orders via SCOTUSblog
by TRC_Admin | Oct 5, 2021 | Master Planning
Scenic Jacksonville is pleased to welcome Ron Littlefield as its guest speaker at its second annual Great Cities Symposium.
This year the Great Cities Symposium is being held on Wednesday, October 6 from 5:30pm – 7:30pm at the Garden Club of Jacksonville.
Sponsors include FIS Global, Foley & Lardner and many others.
The event begins at 5:30 with cocktails and hors d’ouevres, followed by Mayor Littlefield’s remarks at 6:30. Limited seating. Covid-19 precautions observed, bring a mask to use where appropriate.
Littlefield is a city planner and former mayor of Chattanooga. While mayor, he attracted major investment in the city from companies such as Volkswagen and French rail manufacturer Alstom.
Prior to serving two terms as mayor, Littlefield oversaw the undertaking of Vision 2000 — one of the first large scale visioning projects in the US — credited with changing public outlooks and attitudes, paving the way for Chattanooga’s transition from the “dirtiest city in America” to a new local economy based on environmental sustainability and quality of life.
“Chattanooga is cool and green and growing,” Littlefield noted, as he left office in 2013. “No longer dingy and declining. Chattanooga has status as a fast-advancing, youth attracting, ‘cool’ city. Nothing could be finer.”
Always an innovator, Littlefield now is a senior fellow with the Governing Institute and serves as lead analyst on that organization’s City Accelerator project.
— Scenic Jacksonville
For details and to purchase tickets please visit Scenic Jacksonville’s Great Cities Symposium page.
by TRC_Admin | Oct 5, 2021 | Billboards, Legal
Photo: Supremecourt.gov
“…In November, the court will hear argument in City of Austin v. Reagan National Advertising of Texas, a First Amendment challenge to an Austin regulation that bars some digitized billboards but allows others depending on the billboard’s location. A new petition asks the court to take up another challenge to a city policy that involves differential treatment of signs.
The city of Baltimore taxes the owners of displays that advertise services that occur in a different location, meaning many billboards but not other types of signs. One of the country’s largest billboard-advertising companies challenged the tax under the First Amendment. Applying a relaxed standard, Maryland’s highest court upheld the tax as rationally related to the city’s legitimate interest in raising public revenue. In its petition, the billboard owner, one of four such companies in Baltimore, argues that a heightened standard should apply. The company also argues that Baltimore’s distinction between on-premises signs and off-premises signs is ‘even more problematic’ than the one presented in Austin. The case is Clear Channel Outdoor, LLC v. Raymond.”
— Andrew Hamm, SCOTUSblog
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by TRC_Admin | Oct 5, 2021 | Billboards, Legal
Photo: Corrie Schaffeld, Cincinnati Business Courier
“The Ohio Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a tax that Cincinnati City Council put on billboards violated the First Amendment, nullifying it.
After council approved the tax in 2018 aiming to raise $709,000, it never went into effect while the case wound its way through the courts.
The justices reversed a decision by the Hamilton County Appellate Court made in 2020 upholding the imposition of the tax. The court agreed with former Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Curt Hartman, who also believed the tax was unconstitutional, and his successor on the case, Common Pleas Judge Thomas Heekin.
Billboard companies Lamar Advertising and Norton Outdoor Advertising sued the city two years ago after the 7% tax on outdoor billboards was passed, saying it was unconstitutional based on the First Amendment right to free speech and violated the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause and equal protection clauses. The city had approved the tax in order to balance the fiscal year 2019 budget.
‘Even if the city passed the tax ordinance without a motive to censor billboard operators, the threat of overt censorship, self-censorship, or undetectable censorship created by the tax impermissibly infringes on rights protected by the First Amendment,’ wrote Justice Sharon Kennedy. ‘The city’s billboard tax resembles the type of taxes that were a cause of the American Revolution: taxes that curtail the amount of revenue raised by the press through advertisements and tend to directly restrict the circulation of protected expression.’
The court noted that the city exempted all other types of outdoor advertising — ‘potentially thousands’ — from the tax…””
— Chris Wetterich, Cincinnati Business Courier
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