Source: http://openjurist.org/135/f3d/210/ackerley-communications-of-massachusetts-inc-v-city-of-cambridge
Timestamp: 2015-08-03 01:00:21
Document Index: 518791330

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 7', '§ 6', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7', '§ 7']

135 F3d 210 Ackerley Communications of Massachusetts Inc v. City of Cambridge | OpenJurist
135 F. 3d 210 - Ackerley Communications of Massachusetts Inc v. City of Cambridge Home
135 F3d 210 Ackerley Communications of Massachusetts Inc v. City of Cambridge 135 F.3d 210
ACKERLEY COMMUNICATIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS, INC., Plaintiff, Appellant,v.CITY OF CAMBRIDGE and Robert Bersani, etc., Defendants, Appellees.
No. 97-1127.
Heard Oct. 8, 1997.Decided Feb. 5, 1998.
Charles Rothfeld, with whom Andrew L. Frey, Kenneth S. Geller, Mayer, Brown & Platt, Washington, DC, George A. Berman, Joseph S. Berman, Posternak, Blankstein & Lund, Boston, MA, Eric M. Rubin, Walter E. Diercks and Rubin, Winston, Diercks, Harris & Cooke, Washington, DC, were on brief, for appellant.
Peter L. Koff, with whom McGowan, Engel, Tucker, Garrett & Schultz, P.A., Boston, MA, Arthur J. Goldberg, Middletown, RI, and City of Cambridge Law Department were on brief, for appellees.
In an earlier opinion we held that the City of Cambridge had violated the First Amendment rights of Ackerley Communications of Massachusetts, Inc., by requiring it to remove various signs which failed to conform with a recently enacted zoning provision aimed at controlling the proliferation of aesthetically offensive signage. Ackerley Communications of Mass., Inc. v. City of Cambridge, 88 F.3d 33 (1st Cir.1996) ("Ackerley I "). Ackerley now appeals from the judgment entered following our remand, claiming that the district court erred by refusing to void the offending zoning provision in its entirety. We vacate the district court judgment and remand with directions to enter judgment for Ackerley.
Ackerley owns forty-six large advertising signs or billboards, located throughout Cambridge, which carry "off-site" messages, by which we mean signs whose content relates to no commercial or noncommercial activity occurring at the premises where the sign is located.1 The City amended its ordinance in 1991 to require removal of all signs meeting certain objective criteria relating to dimension and location. See Cambridge, Mass., Ordinance 1123, § 7.18.1 (June 10, 1991).
Under the amended criteria, all forty-six Ackerley signs carrying off-site messages were to be removed, since the ordinance contained no "grandfather" provision. The relevant legal environment is further complicated by the Massachusetts Zoning Enabling Act ("MZEA"), however, which prohibits any municipal zoning ordinance provision purporting to regulate existing on-site signage; that is, any sign carrying a message relating to a commercial or noncommercial activity occurring at the premises where the sign is located. See Mass. Gen. Laws Ann. ch. 40A, § 6 (1995).
The City Council which enacted section 7.18.1 understood from the start that its effort to curb visual blight would be thwarted, at least in part, by the MZEA. Be that as it might, the City Council considered off-site signs, such as Ackerley's, the greater aesthetic intrusion, see Ordinance § 7.11.1(F), in the sense that on-site signs at least serve a significant practical purpose by assisting consumers to locate a particular business establishment or product ("Joe's Hardware"), see id. § 7.11.1(G). Accordingly, and since as a general matter the First Amendment does not prefer commercial speech over noncommercial (e.g., political) speech, the Ordinance included a "substitution" provision permitting the owner of a "grandfathered" on-site sign to substitute a noncommercial message for the commercial message previously displayed by its on-site sign (e.g., "Smith for Mayor" replaces "Joe's Hardware"). See id. § 7.17. Finally, it included a "severability" clause saving all "parts" of the Ordinance not specifically held invalid. See id. § 7.30.
Until the Ordinance was amended, most off-site signs owned by Ackerley carried commercial messages, such as advertisements and promotions concerning "for-profit" business ventures. Following its amendment, however, Ackerley's signs have carried only noncommercial messages, such as election advertisements and public service announcements. Ultimately, since the MZEA "grandfather" provision does not cover existing off-site signs, the City directed Ackerley to remove all its signs based on their nonconforming physical characteristics, see Ordinance § 7.18.1.
Ackerley responded by filing the present action in federal district court, seeking a judicial declaration that the Ordinance--on its face and as applied--infringed its First Amendment right to free speech. At the same time, Ackerley demanded injunctive relief from the City order directing it to dismantle its signs.
On appeal we vacated the provisional district court ruling declaring Ordinance § 7.18.1 constitutional. Ackerley I, 88 F.3d at 40. First, we held that the Ordinance and the MZEA, operating in tandem, distinguished between two types of noncommercial speech--on-site and off-site--(i) by permitting nonprofit institutions to display on-site, noncommercial messages on nonconforming signs located on their own premises, and (ii) by allowing on-site sign owners to convert from commercial to noncommercial messages, while denying off-site sign owners either option. We noted that noncommercial speech--for example, political discourse--is accorded the highest level of First Amendment protection, yet the distinction adopted by the Ordinance--though predicated on no aesthetic difference in sign appearance (e.g., size)--plainly imposed unconstitutional restrictions upon the off-site noncommercial speech of the sign owner, by countenancing only those political messages espoused by the owner or occupant of the site where the sign is located, while excluding other political views, such as those held by non-landowners. Thus, we concluded, even though the City might ban all noncommercial messages from aesthetically intrusive signs, it cannot prefer one particular category of political speaker over another. Id. at 37-38.2
Furthermore, because the Ordinance and the MZEA, in tandem, either allowed or denied "grandfathering" protection based on whether the sign carried an on-site or an off-site message on the date the Ordinance was enacted, we concluded that the City had chilled present speech impermissibly by relying on message content to reward on-site speakers for their past speech, while penalizing off-site speakers for their past speech. Id. at 38-39 (citing Ackerley Communications of Mass., Inc. v. City of Somerville, 878 F.2d 513, 519 (1st Cir.1989)).
In a separate discussion captioned "Remedial Option," we went on to note that the City could not correct these unconstitutional effects unilaterally simply by eliminating the "grandfathering" distinction between on-site and off-site signs. See id. at 39-40. Instead, since it was the Commonwealth, through the MZEA, rather than the City through Ordinance § 7.18.1, which established the distinction between on-site and off-site signs, we stated that "[r]elief ... is beyond the scope of this court's power in this case[,]" id. at 39, since amendments to the MZEA "must be left to the workings of the political process." Id. Accordingly, we concluded:
The Cambridge ordinance contains a severability provision stating that, in the event some portion of it is declared invalid, it is the City's intent that the remainder of the ordinance continue in full force and effect. We do not in this decision rule unlawful any particular section of the ordinance. Rather, because the constitutional problem stems from the interplay of the ordinance and the state provision, we hold only that Cambridge may not require removal of signs displaying noncommercial messages based on their exclusion from exemption under the state provision. Reversed and Remanded.
On remand, Ackerley requested a judicial declaration determining section 7.18.1 invalid in its entirety, which would mean that the City could not order the removal of any off-site sign, whether it carried a noncommercial message, as did A