A spokesman for the…
By Dustin Brown
The city’s three largest outdoor advertising companies assailed the City Council’s decision last week to impose tough regulations on billboards in Queens and the rest of the city as a violation of their First Amendment rights.
A spokesman for the companies said they intend to file a federal lawsuit opposing the legislation by the end of the week.
Residents of Woodside and other Queens communities lining the Long Island Expressway have vocally opposed the recent proliferation of billboards as public eyesores and as safety hazards for drivers.
Eller Media, Infinity Outdoor, and Vista Media Group are being represented by Floyd Abrams, the prominent First Amendment lawyer who successfully defended the Brooklyn Museum when the city threatened to withhold its funding following the controversial Sensation exhibit in 1999.
Abrams has based his argument on the language of the legislation, which he said allows the billboard structures to stand but bans only the advertising displayed on the structures — a distinction he said violates the First Amendment rights of the advertisers.
“The billboards don’t have to come down under the legislation,” Abrams said in a telephone interview. “What has to come down is what the statute calls advertising, meaning commercial advertising copy. It’s perfectly legal under the statute to keep all the billboards where they are and to put political or non-commercial advertisements on them or, indeed, to leave the billboards blank.”
The City Council drafted the law to preserve local aesthetics and to protect drivers’ safety, both of which were considered threatened by the recent proliferation of billboards along the city’s roadways. The Council voted unanimously in favor of the legislation Feb. 27.
The legislation not only restricts the size and location of billboards, but also gives the city greater power to enforce the regulations. Further, it creates a voluntary compliance program allowing billboard companies to remove one-third of their non-compliant billboards every year for three years.
Councilman Walter McCaffrey (D-Woodside), chairman of the Subcommittee on Zoning & Franchises, disputed Abram’s interpretation and said the argument has no merit.
“Mr. Abrams is one of our most brilliant First Amendment lawyers in the United States and he has a creative legal mind,” McCaffrey said. “This stretches creativity beyond the point of credibility. That’s nonsensical.”
According to McCaffrey, who has fought against the billboards, the legislation explicitly addresses the billboard structures rather than their content.
“Regardless of what is being advertised, the fact of the matter is that the structure ends up creating a public safety hazard, and therefore under the constitutional parameters of public safety, we can end up eliminating this type of structure,” he said.
Abrams also argued that the law violates the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment — in this case, a $25,000 fine levied against companies that do not comply with the regulations after their first offense.
“Cruel and unusual punishment has been held to include fines that are wholly out of sync with what they are supposedly being imposed to deal with,” Abrams said.
Tim Stauning, Northeast regional president of Eller Media and representative of the three largest outdoor advertisers, has said the legislation would punish companies that thought they were complying with the notoriously ambiguous billboard regulations previously on the books.
“The fact of the matter is that the language was passed in the 1940s,” McCaffrey said in response to Stauning’s argument. “You can look at it where it says you cannot have billboards within 200 feet of an arterial highway. It’s not very complicated language.”
Reach reporter Dustin Brown by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 154.
