Council to target "visual blight" of news racks?
KHOU-11's Doug Miller reports on a strange priority of certain councilmembers:
As downtown Houston livens up and attracts more people, it's also attracting more paper racks. By one count, there are more than 1,400 of them in downtown alone.
"We've spent a lot of money getting downtown back in shape and looking nice and wanting it to be a destination for people. And you've got a visual blight on the sidewalk," said Chuck Jackson, Downtown District Operations Director.
[snip]
Houston regulates signs, but it doesn't regulate advertising sheets stuck in boxes on sidewalks, which are sometimes chained to city property. Now, some city council members want that to change.
"We're just waiting for the legal department to say what we can get away with regulating and what we can't. I hope we can bring that to resolution very quickly," said Houston City Councilmember Carol Alvarado.
But the U.S. Supreme Court has twice shot down city governments that tried to restrict sidewalk paper racks. And of course, some people like finding all this reading material on the streets.
Here's a suggestion for Councilmember Alvarado: Perhaps a better way to reduce really annoying visual clutter in the city would be to invest more in graffiti abatement and bandit-sign eradication. It wouldn't raise constitutional concerns, and it would address two real problems in the city.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 10/04/05 09:32 PM | Houston Miscellany | Print | Comments (7)
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