Court Opinion

ID: 9497747
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:59:08.80636+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:23.715104
License: Public Domain

KENNEDY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Unlike the majority, I would find that the Union is unlikely to succeed on the merits. Therefore, I believe that the district court abused its discretion when it improperly applied the law. Deja Vu of Nashville, Inc., V. Metro. Gov’t of Nashville & Davidson County, 274 F.3d 377, 400 (6th Cir.2001). Additionally, I do not believe that the other factors (irreparable harm, harm to others, and the public’s interest), many, if not all, of which rest on the perceived violation of the Union’s First Amendment rights, weigh so heavily in *465favor of the plaintiffs that those factors support the grant of a preliminary injunction. Therefore, I respectfully dissent. '
A. Likelihood of success on the merits
1. The rat is a structure.
As a preliminary matter, there are several points on which the district court, the majority, and I agree. First, we agree that the rat constitutes speech. Furthermore, we agree that the rat constitutes speech that deserves First Amendment protection. Implicitly at least, we all agree that the City’s ordinance applies to the rat (making the rat a structure under either the first or the revised definition). The district court attempts to avoid this conclusion by holding that “It is not appropriate to simply label the rat a structure and then ban it from the right-of-way without examining the nature of the alleged structure.” Apx. 46. The majority opinion does not explicitly address whether the rat is a structure, but, by applying a time, place, and manner analysis, it too implicitly agrees that the inflatable rat is a structure under either version of the ordinance’s definition.
Although I may seem to be quibbling over details, I am not: Courts must avoid raising constitutional issues where alternative and narrower grounds exist. Bejjani, v. I.N.S., 271 F.3d 670, 687 (6th Cir.2001). If the rat is not a structure as the ordinance defines it (or defined it), then the district court erred in ruling on a First Amendment basis where none was present. Instead, it should have held that the - rat was not a structure and ordered the City to cease attempting to apply the ordinance to the rat. Because the district court rules on First Amendment grounds and because the majority reviews that analysis, the majority seems to agree (at least implicitly) that the inflatable rat falls under the ordinances’ definitions of structure.
In my view, .the rat is a structure under either version of the ordinance. Even under the earlier ordinance, the City defined a structure, in part, as: “... anything constructed which is not enclosed within another structure. and is placed in a stationary location.” Although the first part of the definition includes a requirement that the structure be permanent, this second part does not. Dictiohary.com defines constructed as: “To form by assembling or combining parts; build.” (available at http://dictionary.reference.com/search? q=constructed). The Random House College Dictionary- Revised Edition defines construct as “to form by putting together parts; build; devise.” 1980.
By using a generator to inflate the rat on a tarp, the rat is assembled or formed by putting together parts. By tethering it to the ground, the rat is further formed by combining parts. Given these definitions, the inflatable- rat meets the ordinance’s requirement that it be constructed. In addition, the rat satisfies the “placed in a stationary location” requirement given that the rat and its generator are placed in a stationary location when they are-staked down, albeit, for one to two hours, or for however long the Union decides to leave them there. Therefore, the rat meets all of the requirements under this portion of the first ordinance’s definition of structure.1 No one disputes that the rat meets *466the City’s revised definition of structure. Because the rat is a structure, and because both versions of the ordinance ban all structures in right-of-ways, we must address the constitutional question of whether the City can use its ordinance to ban the rat despite the fact that the rat is speech.
2. The ordinance is a permissible time, place, and manner restriction.
We also agree on most points of the First Amendment analysis. I agree with the district court and the majority that the right-of-way is a traditional public forum; that the area where the rat was erected was akin to a sidewalk; and that time, place, and, manner analysis is the appropriate framework for reviewing the ordinance as applied.
When performing a time, place, and manner analysis, courts must evaluate the ordinance against several standards. First, courts must determine whether the ordinance is content neutral. No one disputes that the City’s ordinance is content neutral. It is important to keep in mind that the ordinance applies city-wide to all rights-of-way whether there are sidewalks and a tree lawn, or just a grassy area as we have here.
Next under time, place, and manner analysis, we evaluate whether the City has a significant interest as well as whether the ordinance is narrowly tailored to meet that interest. All agree that the City has a significant interest. The majority identifies the City’s significant interests as keeping the right-of-way clear (presumably to further public safety and permit pedestrian passage) and preserving the aesthetics of the community. I agree that those interests are significant. See Ward, et al., v. Rock Against Racism, 491 U.S. 781, 796, 109 S.Ct. 2746, 105 L.Ed.2d 661 (1989) (noting that protecting citizens from excessive noise is a significant government interest); City of Lakewood v. Plain Dealer Publishing Co., 486 U.S. 750, 781-82, 108 S.Ct. 2138, 100 L.Ed.2d 771 (1988) (identifying public safety as a significant interest); Clark v. Community for Creative Non-Violence, et al., 468 U.S. 288, 296, 104 S.Ct. 3065, 82 L.Ed.2d 221 (1984) (identifying keeping our nation’s parks in an attractive condition as a significant interest); Heffron, et al., v. International Society for Krishna Consciousness, 452 U.S. 640, 650, 101 S.Ct. 2559, 69 L.Ed.2d 298 (1981) (upholding the state’s interest of maintaining the orderly movement of crowds at a fail”).
The majority and I part company, however, in our view of whether the ordinance is narrowly tailored to serve the identified significant government interests. The majority believes that the ordinance is not narrowly tailored. In so holding the majority reasons:
[The interests] are simply not achieved any less effectively absent the application of the ordinance in this case. There is no objective evidence in the record before us suggesting that the temporary placement of the balloon in the public right-of-way has any adverse effects, such as obstruction of pedestrian or automobile traffic. By applying the ordinance to prohibit the temporary use of the balloon in this case, it therefore appears that the City has applied its ordinance in a manner that is “substantially broader than necessary” to achieve its interests. Thus, the district court did not abuse its discretion in finding that *467the Union has demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits.
Maj. Op. 464. I believe that the majority departs from Supreme Court precedent, which admonishes lower courts that a regulation is narrowly tailored so long as.it “ ... promotes a substantial government interest that would be achieved less effectively absent the regulation.” United States v. Albertini, 472 U.S. 675, 689, 105 S.Ct. 2897, 86 L.Ed.2d 536 (1985). In Frisby v. Schultz, 487 U.S. 474, 485, 108 S.Ct. 2495, 101 L.Ed.2d 420 (1988) the Court indicated that a complete ban “can be narrowly tailored but only if each activity within the proscription’s scope is an appropriately targeted evil.” In Ward, the Court clarified its earlier jurisprudence by confirming that: “So long as the means chosen are not substantially broader than necessary to achieve the government’s interest, however, the regulation will not be invalid simply because a court concludes that the government’s interest could be adequately served by some less-speech-restrictive alternative.” Ward, 491 U.S. at 800, 109 S.Ct. 2746. Thus, the Court has indicated that, in this context, the narrowly tailored test is a far more lenient test than a least restrictive means test. Id. Indeed, some amount of overinclusiveness is permissible provided that the evil targeted by the statute is permissible. See id. (The Court indicates that “the.. .regulation may [not] burden substantially more speech than is necessary” indicating that some overinclusiveness may be permissible).
In finding that the ordinance is not narrowly tailored, the district court held that it was important to investigate the nature of the structure. Apx. 46. The majority seems to agree with that analysis. I believe that investigating the nature of the structure, beyond what little investigation is required to determine whether an object is a structure, is an- incorrect mode of analysis that has the effect of saddling the City with an impossible legislative task, or requiring courts to reach necessarily arbitrary results. Why does a structure whose nature only requires it to be present for a limited time not undermine the City’s objective of keeping the right-of-way clear when a more permanent structure does so? The district court indicates that if the Union wished to leave the' inflatable rat in the right-of-way constantly, it would reach a different result. Apx. 46. What exactly constitutes “an extended period of time” that'would require resolving this dispute in the City’s favor? Id. Four hours? Ten? Twenty-four? Alternatively, what public employee is to be given the discretion to determine that amount of time, and how is that discretion to be limited so that time, place, and manner neutrality is maintained?
While I do not want to belabor the line-drawing problems, I raise them simply because I do not believe that the district court’s position is a tenable way to evaluate the level of protection the structure deserves. Instead, I believe that we must look to the significant interest and then determine whether the ordinance narrowly targets the identified evil. Ward, 491 U.S. at 799-800, 109 S.Ct. 2746.
In evaluating whether the ordinance is narrowly tailored to serve the significant interest, it is, in my view, also important to evaluate whether the ordinance serves a significant interest, and whether it is narrowly tailored, independently of the value courts accord the speech. The majority believes that: “By applying" the ordinance to prohibit the temporary use of the balloon in this case, it therefore appears that the City has applied its ordinance in a manner that is ‘substantially broader than necessary’ to achieve its interests.” Maj. Op. 464 (emphasis mine). Although this is *468an as-applied analysis, the majority’s rule on narrow tailoring quickly becomes an easy way for courts to second guess legislatures. Courts would be able to carve out exceptions to the enforcement of ordinances if the court deems the speech at issue vital enough simply by balancing the identified interest against the value of the speech. In essence, judges would be able to substitute their own judgments as to the value of different kinds of speech in an as-applied challenge and balance that speech with their view of the value of the government interest at stake. My guess is that, subjected to such a balance, few ordinances would survive unscathed. Nor can the City leave to the discretion of some city employee that decision without running afoul of the Court’s decision in Plain Dealer, 486 U.S. at 763-64, 108 S.Ct. 2138 (“[W]e have often and uniformly held that such statutes or policies impose censorship on the public or the press, and hence are unconstitutional, because without standards governing the exercise of discretion, a government official may decide who may speak and who may not based upon the content of the speech or viewpoint of the speaker.”).
While protecting speech is undoubtedly among the most important things the judiciary does, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on time, place, and manner restrictions does not subject those restrictions to such rigorous or arbitrary scrutiny. So long as, in general, the City has a significant government interest, and so long as the ordinance is narrowly tailored to serve that interest, as is the case here, it should not matter what type of speech is affected by the ordinance for the purpose of this portion of time, place, and manner analysis. Thus, we should evaluate an ordinance’s narrow tailoring only in relation to the identified significant government interest and not in relation to the speech it affects.
Given that the interest here is keeping the right-of-way clear, an outright ban of structures is a reasonably narrow means of serving that interest. The right-of-way is blocked by a structure regardless of whether that structure is present for one hour or one year. Part of the public safety rationale that forms the basis for keeping the right-of-way clear likely involves allowing emergency vehicles free access to it in the event of a problem. If a structure is present in the right-of-way for any period of time, that significant interest is diminished. While it is true that a structure present for two hours diminishes the interest less than would a structure present for a much longer time, all that the City needs to show in order to prove narrow tailoring is that the evil targeted is remedied by the ordinance in a manner that is not unnecessarily overinclusive. I believe that the ordinance in this case meets that standard and is, therefore, narrowly tailored to serve the significant interest.2
Because I believe that the ordinance is narrowly tailored to serve a significant interest, I must also address the final portion of time, place, and manner analysis, which requires that the ordinance in question “leave open ample alternative channels of communication..'. ”. Ward, 491 U.S. at 802, 109 S.Ct. 2746. Ample alternative channels of communication are readily available here.
The City’s complaint, at least the one identified in the briefs and at oral argument, is not that the rat is present at all in the right-of-way, instead, the City objects to it being staked down and kept in place. The Union indicates that the rat could be *469moved around instead of staking it down. Apx. 159-61. In addition, presumably, so long as the rat was placed on a cart or a wagon and provided that the cart or the wagon was moved about during the demonstration, the City would not object to its presence as the ordinance would not apply. Even if I am incorrect and the inflatable rat itself could not be used, the Union could still make signs with pictures of rats on them, pass out smaller rat balloons to passers-by, or use many other methods to communicate its message. Ample alternative channels of communication are available here. Therefore, because I believe that the ordinance as-applied to the rat passes the time, place, and manner tests, I believe that the Union is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its case.
B. Other factors
Given that I do not believe that the Union is likely to succeed on the merits, I do not believe that it would suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is not granted. Furthermore, given that the Union has ample alternative channels of communication available to it, I believe that any harm it would suffer would be minimal. Therefore, this factor, at best, does not weigh in favor of either party, and it may weigh in favor of not granting the injunction. Finally, although the majority believes that “the public interest factor in this case dearly weighs in favor of protecting the First Amendment rights of the Union’s members[.]” (citation omitted) (emphasis mine), I believe that this interest must be balanced with the public interest in local governments being able to legislate and enforce laws that those governments deem necessary. Therefore, I do not believe that this factor is clearly in favor of either party even if the constitutional issues do tilt the balance one way. Finally, while granting the injunction will likely not harm others, that factor alone cannot save the district court s grant of a preliminary injunction, even on abuse of discretion review.
C. Conclusion
Because I believe that the City’s ordinance is a permissible time, place, and manner restriction, that that fact means that the Union is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its case, and because I do not believe that the other factors point clearly in one direction, I believe that it was an abuse of discretion for the district court to grant the preliminary injunction. I would reverse the district court’s grant of a preliminary injunction and remand for further proceedings.

. The revised ordinance defines structure as . any object, whether permanent or temporary, including, but not limited to, nonpublic signs, that is constructed, erected or placed in a stationary location on the ground or is attached to or placed upon an object constructed, erected or placed in a stationary location on the ground.” By including "any object, whether permanent or temporary,” the ordinance alleviates the district court’s *466concern that the earlier ordinance might have only applied to permanent structures. As I discuss later, I do not believe that one can look to the nature of a structure in determining whether the city can constitutionally ban it through a time, place, and manner restriction.

. The above analysis also applies to the aesthetic significant interest of the city. The city's aesthetic goals are diminished the moment a structure is constructed in the right-of-way.