What is it with Salida and the American Civil Liberties Union? This is a little town far from the mainstream, and yet twice in the past decade the municipal government and the ACLU have tangled with each other.
The first time came in 1997, when the city council passed an inane loitering ordinance. Basically, it said that if you stayed in one place more than five minutes in certain parts of town (the downtown commercial district, near a school, etc.) then you could be cited and fined for loitering.
Among the other flaws of this ordinance, it made no exceptions for lawful business. If two firefighters stood outside a building in support of two other firefighters in the smoky building, and they were there for more than five minutes, they would have been breaking the law.
I called the police department once to announce I planned to violate the loitering law, because I needed to stand on the sidewalk in front of my house (which was across the street from a school) to trim some foliage, and I’d be in certain spots for more than five minutes.
The police dispatcher said she’d get back to me, but never did. And since a city ordinance also demands that I trim trees so that they don’t interfere with pedestrian traffic on that sidewalk, I wondered which law to obey.
Two friends were arrested for “interfering with police operations” after they stood on the sidewalk downtown and watched a teenager being arrested for loitering. We gave serious thought to getting bumper stickers that said “I loiter and I vote.”
Fortunately, the ACLU agreed to fight the loitering law. The municipal judge ruled it unconstitutional because it was way too broad. A new city administration, elected in large part on account of voter disgust with the previous council and mayor over the loitering ordinance, decided not to appeal, and the ordinance was repealed.
This time around, it’s the sign code. Salida has one that it does not enforce for political messages during election seasons. This allows me to conduct the “Quillen Informal Yard Sign Survey,” and it’s never failed to predict a local election accurately. I look not only for quantity, but for Republican signs in front of Democratic households and vice-versa.
The sign in question recently is on the side of a downtown building. It is 32 square feet. It says “Kill one person and it’s MURDER. Kill thousands and it’s FOREIGN POLICY. STOP THE IRAQ WAR NOW!” The front of the building has two signs, for commercial enterprises on the bottom floor, that total 26 square feet. So altogether there is 58 square feet of signage.
Under the sign code, this building – with 50 feet of frontage – is allowed only 33 square feet of signage. So someone complained to the city and the city told Debra Juchem, the owner of the building, to remove about 25 square feet of signage.
But the sign on the side is a political message, she argued, and the city hasn’t been enforcing the code against political signs. But this isn’t about a specific candidate or election issue, the city responded.
Juchem went to the ACLU for legal assistance. Rather than fight the case in court, the city has backed down, and is still working on a new sign code.
It’s going to be tricky, because there are some big “ghost signs” painted on the sides of some old brick buildings. One that comes to mind urges you to buy dynamite at Patterson Hardware – which went out of business years ago. They offer some historic charm, but how to distinguish them from other signs?
The spot where the contended sign perches has a bit of history, too. Back in the 1980s, the building was owned by Ralph Taylor, a local peace activist who eventually served a term as mayor.
Taylor had “REAGAN’S A LIAR” painted in big letters on his building, so it was the first message many people noticed when driving into town.
A local Rotarian entrusted with retrieving some visitors from the Soviet Union at Denver’s airport around then related one of the Russians’ reaction to the sign: “You really do have freedom of speech in this country, don’t you?”
May it always be so.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine. com) writes on Tuesdays and Sundays.
