In national politics, the notion of a discrete campaign season has given way to the endless cycle of gladhanding and stump speeches that’s known to the chattering classes as the “permanent campaign.”
Office seekers at the local level have, so far, resisted this same tendency to launch the next electoral campaign even as the confetti from the last victorious vote still litters the ballroom. Yet, even here, the campaign season seems to be arriving sooner than ever – as evident from the growing number of political yard signs that are cluttering the landscape long before such signs have traditionally been allowed to go up.
This early appearance of campaign signage is, in part, the result of a growing reticence among local governments to enforce the time limits that they’ve traditionally imposed on these temporary placards. This sense of wariness largely dates back to 2011, when a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court took much of the regulatory bite out of many local sign ordinances.
In Burlington, for instance, the city’s code enforcement officers have recently restricted their enforcement of political signage to the public right of way – where they have the aegis of state law to shield them from a potentially costly legal misstep.
According to Chris Marland, the city’s chief code enforcement officer, Burlington owes most of its current limits on campaign signs to regulations pioneered at the state-level.
“The rules come straight out of state statute,” Marland explained in an interview with The Alamance News. “[Signs] are a form of speech, so we want people to do what they want to do within the statutory limits.”
For Marland and many of his peers, this diffidence over sign regulations harks back to the U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking ruling in a case dubbed Reed v. the town of Gilbert.
This case, which came before the highest court in the land 13 years ago, was brought by a church in Gilbert, Arizona after municipal authorities had forced it to remove a temporary event sign that had violated the town’s sign ordinance.
A unanimous court ultimately sided with the church’s objections to the town’s regulations, although the justices differed in their legal reasoning for rejecting the municipal ordinance. A majority of the justices pointed to the ordinance’s distinction among event signage, political placards, and ideological messaging, and they concluded that these categories constituted a “content-based” approach to sign regulation. As content-based regulation, the ordinance faced a rather tough test to determine if it passed Constitutional muster. Known as “strict scrutiny,” this legal standard demands that a regulation not only advances a “compelling government interest” but is, moreover, “narrowly tailored” to meet that objective.
In the final analysis, the Supreme Court resolved that Gilbert’s sign ordinance had fallen short of the strict scrutiny standard. But disagreements among the justices have forced legal scholars to do some interpretative gymnastics to figure out the precise repercussions that this ruling would have on Main Street, U.S.A.
In 2018, Adam Lovelady, an expert on land use law at UNC’s School of Government, tried to pick this tar baby apart in an installment of Coates’ Canons – the School’s long-running blog on topics in local government law. Lovelady acknowledged in this particular post that the regulation of political signs can be rather “confusing” due to the Reed ruling as well as the overlapping jurisdictions of state and local governments.
Lovelady was nevertheless confident that local governments would be on safe legal ground if they imposed “reasonable, content-neutral limits” on the “size, number, and location” of temporary signs. He even suggested that there may be an opening for time-based restrictions on campaign signage based on the majority opinion that Justice Clarence Thomas had penned in the Reed case.
“The Reed decision,” Lovelady went on to concede, “did not directly address the question of durational limits for noncommercial signs, but [it] did discuss it indirectly. Justice Thomas implies that a regulatory provision related to ‘whether and when an event is occurring’ may be permissible if it permits ‘citizens to post signs on any topic whatsoever within a set period leading up to an election.’ Along that line of thinking, a local government could establish a set amount of time (for example, ninety days before an election until ten days after the election) and permit a greater amount of temporary noncommercial signage during that time period.
Lovelady added that, even before the Reed ruling, courts across the U.S. were “routinely striking down sign codes that limited campaign signs to less than sixty days.” The broad moral, he went on to stress, is that counties and municipalities must proceed gingerly whenever they attempt to regulate political signage.
In any event, the chilling effect of the Reed ruling has been most pronounced when temporary signs have popped up on private property. In North Carolina, local governments seem far less reticent to restrict signage within the public right-of-way thanks to a state statute that explicitly regulates political signs along state-maintained roads.
Under this statute, political signs can go up within the state’s right-of-way no more than 30 days before the start of early voting for a given election. The statute also requires them to come down within 10 days of the election itself. The statute contains additional rules for the size and placement of permissible signs, and it forbids new signage to cover up existing signs or interfere with visibility at intersections. It also makes it clear that anyone who puts up a sign must have the blessing of whoever owns the property that fronts along the roadway in question.
The statute goes on to give cities and towns the discretion to impose regulations on political signage within their own public right of way. Several municipalities in Alamance County have availed themselves of this right to adopt their own limits, and links to most of these rules can be found on the website for Alamance County’s board of elections.
The state’s statutory provisions ultimately form the bedrock for all of the municipal sign regulations that the local elections board has compiled. In Burlington, for example, most of the city’s restrictions have been lifted lock, stock, and barrel out of the relevant statute.
Burlington’s pilfered provisions, which include a time limit that matches the state’s word for word, apply both to the state’s right of way and to the comparable area along city-owned streets. Yet, according to Marland, these rules peter out at the point where the right of way meets private property.
“We adopted the state statute word for word because we didn’t want to get into a legal battle over the ordinance,” the city’s chief code enforcement officer elaborates. “The state statute that dictates the time frame is talking about signs in the right of way. So, we only enforce the time limit in the right of way, and in the yard, there is no time limit.”
Burlington’s code enforcement staff nevertheless gives some attention to political signs that are situated squarely on privately-owned property. In fact, the city’s unified development ordinance includes some dimensional requirements that apply explicitly to campaign signs “on individual lots.” The ordinance demands that these signs can be no taller than “five feet above the adjacent grade” and no larger than 32 square feet in their overall surface area.
Marland conceded that his staff will readily uproot any signs they see in the public right of way that exceed the stipulated dimensions. He added, however, that they merely send a notice of violation to property owners who have overly-large signs on their own real estate.
The local elections board has also complied rules for other cities and towns on its website. Some of these municipal regulations stick quite close to the state statue. In fact, Elon’s rules, as cited by the local elections board, are a mere regurgitation of the statute. Other municipalities have time limits and dimensional restrictions that differ substantially from the state’s statutory provisions – although it’s unclear how many actually enforce these restrictions.
According to the rules that the local elections board has posted for Graham, the period when campaign signs are able to flourish begins 45 days “before the actual election day” and ends 7 days after that date. Graham also permits only “one sign per candidate per zoning lot,” and prohibits “display surface” of any one sign to exceed 16 square feet.
In Mebane, each candidate is also allotted a maximum of one sign per zoning lot, although the maximum dimensions of each sign cannot exceed 4 square feet. The city allows these signs to go up 60 days “before the appropriate election” and demands their removal within 4 days of the vote.
The town of Haw River also permits a maximum display surface of 16 square feet for a political sign, although it restricts the maximum height of each sign to 6 feet. Although the town doesn’t stipulate a starting time for campaign signs to go up, it mandates their removal within two days of the election.
Green Level, meanwhile, allows a maximum display surface of 18 square feet, and it allows signs to go up 45 days “before the appropriate election date” as long as they’re gone within seven days of that date.
The only rules on the books in Gibsonville and Swepsonville concern the removal of political signs. The deadline in the former case is 7 days after the election, while the latter requires signs to come down 10 days after voters go to the polls.
