October 2004

Dallas wants to regulate news racks in downtown

The city of Dallas is proposing to amend its news rack ordinance to standardize rack design and strengthen regulations on where racks can be located.

City officials met with newspaper publishers in May to begin discussions on a news rack proposal in which the city would set design standards based on uniformity and consistency of appearance. The city also proposed that free and paid publications be housed in the same types of racks.

Dee Cody, a city senior real estate specialist, said the city hoped to draft a proposed ordinance by the end of the year. The changes would only cover the central business district and entertainment districts.

Dallas city officials surveyed 14 other cities’ sample news rack ordinances. They hope to incorporate the best components of the survey cities as well as publishers’ input into the new ordinance.

The city of Dallas has been issuing licenses for news racks in the public right of way for more than 50 years and currently 43 publications hold licenses to install racks. The city estimates 3,530 news racks are located citywide with more than 1,600 in the central business district alone.

Dallas’ current regulations do not address design standards and only provide minimum guidelines for location of racks and to date enforcement has been voluntary. The city currently charges $5 per rack annually.

In its May presentation, the city showed pictures of downtown Dallas where news racks of various shapes, sizes and colors dotted a sidewalk.

Another slide showed San Francisco where newspapers are housed in large modular newspaper racks that contain multiple publications with separate doors and coin mechanisms for each publication.

The city of San Francisco installed the modular racks after reaching a settlement in 2002 with publishers who sued over a law passed four years earlier that forbid freestanding racks in parts of the city.

Regulation of news racks is a hot topic that often causes officials and publishers to clash over what the city sees as an aesthetic issue and newspapers view as a First Amendment right.

Nationwide there have been several court cases involving government regulation of news racks. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press tracks such cases involving newspapers.

• In 2002 a federal appeals court upheld a judge’s order preventing Atlanta’s largest airport from enforcing its 4-year-old plan to control where newspapers are sold. The plan charged publishers $20 to sell newspapers from designated city-owned racks that advertised Coca Cola products.

• Also in 2002 the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned an injunction from 1999 that barred Honolulu officials from conducting separate lotteries for free and paid publications to determine which publications get to use city-owned news racks.

• In 1995 the U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis upheld a federal district court ruling that South Dakota’s state regulations limiting vending machines at rest stops violate a newspaper publisher’s First Amendment right.

• Also in 1995 the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Coral Gables, Fla., ordinance that regulated the size, color and placement of news racks and banned advertisements on the racks. A Spanish-language newspaper challenged the law after being told to paint its purple racks beige or brown.