The legal battle is on between Clear Channel Outdoor and the City of Tacoma about the company’s right to keep billboards in the city.

With the city’s long-delayed anti-billboard ordinance set to go into effect Wednesday, Clear Channel Outdoor filed suit last week with Pierce County Superior Court protesting the law’s legality.

The ordinance gave billboard owners an Aug. 1, 2007, deadline to remove billboards the city deemed too large, too ugly or too disruptive. But Clear Channel Outdoor, which operates all the city’s 193 affected billboards, says the sweeping ban violates free-speech rights and doesn’t give the company just compensation for the signs’ removal.

Over the weekend, many of the ads on the company’s billboards across town were replaced with the message “Constitutions Matter.” Clear Channel’s local and corporate offices wouldn’t comment on the lawsuit or the signs Monday.

The ban takes aim at billboards that are bigger than 300 square feet or within 250 feet of a residential area, church, school, historic district or park. The City Council passed it in 1997 in response to the erection of a 600-square-foot billboard at South Union Avenue and Center Street, as well as an increasing number of billboards popping up on roadside property under tribal jurisdiction.

The council granted billboard owners a 10-year amortization period to recoup their investments before the ban would be imposed. In the lawsuit filed Thursday, however, Clear Channel Outdoor said the amortization period doesn’t count as just compensation under the Fifth Amendment.

The lawsuit also argues that the ban violates constitutionally protected free-speech rights in how it defines a billboard. The ordinance calls a sign a billboard if it bears advertisements for off-site products, services or events, but not if it bears a political message like “Elect Jim Smith,” according to the complaint. The criteria for imposing the ban is therefore not content-neutral, it argues, and violates the First Amendment.

“If the message on a given structure read ‘Save the Whales,’ the structure was not a billboard, and not subject to forced removal,” the complaint reads. “If that same structure had a message reading ‘Shop at Joes,’ it was a ‘billboard’ subject to later forced removal. Accordingly, a sign owner could avoid forced removal by changing the message on the sign.”

City of Tacoma spokesman Rob McNair-Huff said Monday that the city’s legal team was reviewing the lawsuit to determine a course of action.

In a statement, Clear Channel Outdoor would not comment on the litigation itself, but expressed a desire “to work with the City of Tacoma to find a mutually agreeable solution.”

For noncompliance, the company faces a daily fine of $24,125, or $125 per day for every sign in the city.

City Councilman Tom Stenger said the ban is fair and Clear Channel Outdoor knows it. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that billboards can be regulated for aesthetics or traffic safety, and that amortization periods can be used as compensation when cities demand their removal, according to a 2004 review of case law conducted by the U.S. Government Assessment Office.

“They’re just used to bullying people and they want to bully Tacoma, too,” Stenger said. “They’ve known about this for 10 years. I think they only care about making money – they don’t care about the constitution.”

Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit opposing visual pollution, said he’d never heard of Clear Channel putting up “Constitutions Matter” signs to oppose a billboard ban, but that the move is consistent with the company’s style.

“These billboards are a kind of disinformation campaign to confuse people about the legal rights of the billboard industry,” Fry said. “They always try to exaggerate their position.”

William Brinton, a Jacksonville, Fla., attorney who serves on the board of Scenic America, said Clear Channel is making the same arguments that have been struck down before in higher courts.

“Billboards are merely structures on a landscape,” Brinton said. “It’s a place where speech occurs, but it doesn’t mean you can’t regulate it. You can regulate it on the basis of aesthetics.”

The city may owe the company money for about 30 billboards that are visible from state highways, Tacoma’s building official implied in a letter to Clear Channel in June. Those signs fall under the state’s Scenic Vistas Act, which orders that a company receive monetary compensation in exchange for the removal of roadside signs.

Melissa Santos: 253-552-7058

melissa.santos@thenewstribune.com