Free Speech Seattle works to strip city's poster ban

By The Associated Press

07.26.99

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SEATTLE — When Stanley went missing, Robin Haglund didn't call the police. Instead, she and her husband put up signs on poles and lampposts around the neighborhood. They talked to neighbors. They called the pound.

Haglund found her cat, but she also found notice of $424 in fines in her mailbox.

She'd violated Seattle's 5-year-old ordinance against posting, nailing, plastering or stapling signs on utility poles or any other city-owned surface.

The city Transportation Department has levied $132,000 in fines since the law went into effect in 1994. The penalty is $53 per sign — Haglund posted eight — plus $250 for those caught in the act.

The costs are too high for many, and activist networks, bands, garage salers and pet owners lament the loss of a cheap way to promote their words, wares and woes.

Free Speech Seattle, a grass-roots political organization 10 members strong, hopes to change that with Seattle City Initiative 46, which would allow posters on the city's more than 150,000 utility poles and lampposts. The activists are willing to live with the rest of the ordinance, which bans posters on traffic-control devices and city-owned structures, trees and shrubbery.

"Increasingly people need that media outlet — just regular people who need a voice," says campaign manager Tim Crowley, 43, a hospital worker who designs Web pages for local bands.

A city task force, meanwhile, is working to find middle ground everyone can live with.

Legislating neatness in the '90s
Spreading the word with posters on utility poles has been prevalent here since the 1960s, when the signs concerned anti-war or civil rights demonstrations and gatherings of hippies for subculture music festivals.

From the perspective of local businesses and authorities, the practice began reaching critical mass in the 1980s.

Complaints about poles slathered inches deep in posters promoting concerts, political actions and bake sales got the City Council's attention. When Seattle welcomed world leaders for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 1993, the city spent $100,000 to strip the poles clean.

But it took a while to figure out how to tackle the problem politically.

Then in early 1994 at a City Council hearing, electrical workers complained of injuries from the staples and nails left in the poles when fliers were ripped away. That — and a rash of poster fires in 1992 and '93 — brought public safety into the equation.

The ban was law by March 1994.

All this was news to Haglund, a graphics designer who moved here in 1996.

"I was a little upset that they were going to charge me $50 a flier to pull down one piece of paper," she said. "I wasn't trying to sell anything ... I was trying to find something I loved and the city was trying to charge me for it."

Seattle's not alone.

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in City Council v. Taxpayers for Vincent, that it was not a free-speech violation for the city of Los Angeles to ban the posting of signs on public property. A 6-3 majority said the right to speak and distribute literature on public property, and to post signs on private property with owner permission, provided city residents with "ample alternative modes of communication."

In the past few years, officials in Des Moines, Iowa, Phoenix, Baton Rouge, La., Jersey City, N.J., Washington, D.C., New York and Nashville, Tenn., have cracked down, too.

On the pro-poster side, voters in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and folks in Amherst, Mass., defeated proposed bans on posters and handbills.

Free Speech Seattle hopes to win over voters here. The group has until Aug. 24 to collect 19,000 voter signatures, which would put its initiative to a City Council vote or on the November ballot. The group has gathered about 12,000 signatures since February.

No alternatives
Some view the ban — with no approved alternatives — as a restriction on free speech. The ordinance hinders political expression, especially dissident opinion, Crowley says.

There was supposed to be an alternative. When the ban was passed, the City Council set aside $20,000 to build information kiosks — small structures with walls for displaying posters and notices.

But responsibility for design, construction, site location and maintenance was left to local folks and only one was built, in Seattle's Magnolia area, said Rebecca Sadinsky of the city's Department of Neighborhoods.

A City Council kiosk task force has been working since last summer, looking into where the city could place such structures, the costs involved — and even revoking the ban.

City Councilman Nick Licata, who heads the panel, considers posters a reflection of Seattle's lively music and cultural scene. The task force is expected to finish its work by late September.

Seattle City Light will produce one of two prototype kiosks for the task force, says Phillip Fujii, who is with the electrical utility's neighborhood programs.

But kiosks don't work in all situations, Sadinsky notes.

"If you have a garage sale, you don't want a poster down the block on a pole, you want it near the street where people can see it," she said.

Crowley agrees, but says kiosks and poles need not be mutually exclusive.

Jerry Yerkes, business representative for International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 77, suggests bulletin boards bolted to the poles. Line workers would be happy to take them down when they're in the way and then put them back when the job is done, he said — as they do with city parking signs.

Haglund, meanwhile, got her fine reduced by half and was happy to put the issue behind her.

"The good news is we got our cat back," she said. "The bad news is that it cost a couple hundred dollars to do it."