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Health & Fitness

One View: Proposed Mural Law Makes Artists Work for Free

The City's proposed mural greatly improves existing law. Nonetheless, it has some troubling provisions.

The urban landscape in Los Angeles, unlike that of other metropolises, lacks the human presence on the streets. It is sometimes seems as if this city exists without people. The City has pockets of visible humanity in neighborhoods where many feet have been worn the sidewalk and the touch of many hands have colored street-facing walls.

Echo Park is one of the vibrant pockets of the city where many people of many ethnic and sometimes several sexual identities walk, and murals and other forms of street art both illustrate and illuminate their diverse perspectives on the world.  The City’s government gets in the way of community expression and the proposed mural ordinance is a lot better than existing law but not good enough to survive Constitutional scrutiny.

The City proposes an ordinance amending the Municipal Code to allow art murals on private property through an administrative permit. 

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The code language indicates the ordinance is to be considered an exception to the Constitutional protection of speech because it is a “time/place/manner” permit.

 The fee for a new original art mural permit -- $199 – may be the real purpose for the ordinance but the purported point of the proposed ordinance is to remedy its unconstitutional existing code that relates to murals.

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Vintage murals  (murals created before the ordinance is adopted) would be allowed to continue to exist.   Original art murals – but not vinyl or digitally produced art or changing image murals – would be allowed.  Murals where the artist gets paid are considered signs and fall under the City’s sign ordinance.  

Los Angeles City Code, § 91.6201 (the sign ordinance) requires private owners obtain permits for all signage. On May 8, 2000, Ordinance 173988 created a broad definition of super-graphics, and super-graphics now fall in the category of “signage” in the Municipal Code.

Ordinance 174517, enacted in 2002, regulates murals on private property even more strictly, and requires that a legally adopted specific plan approve all murals.

On March 4th, 2008 the City Council passed ordinance 179714, which requires that the Cultural Affairs Commission approve all murals.  That ordinance violates Constitutional protection of speech.

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution codifies freedom of speech as a constitutional right: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  Commercial speech – speech mainly in furtherance of selling a product -- is subject to a lower level of scrutiny, although recent Supreme Court decisions bring commercial speech closer to “core” (political) speech. 

This ordinance allowed for the fining of owners of private walls with murals because murals fit within the definition of “graffiti” in LA City Municipal Code: Article 14 of Chapter IV:

The City Council -- responsive to voter outrage -- passed a moratorium on the present ordinance that is set to expire on July 13, 2012.  

The proposed ordinance is a lot less restrictive then the existing moratorium but it requires that compensated art be considered a sign that is regulated under the sign ordinance.    Why shouldn’t a property owner pay an artist to paint a mural – possibly an ideological or religious mural -- on an exterior wall?   What’s the rationale for requiring that artists not be paid?

There is also no explanation provided for the exclusion of vinyl or other applied art or flashing art from the mural ordinance. 

 The property owner must participate in a neighborhood meeting about his proposed mural, but “in no event will an Original Art Mural be granted or denied based upon the content of the mural.”  This provision leaves open the possibility that a property owner’s neighbors can oppose exterior art they don’t like because they don’t find it pretty, and that could eliminate a lot of very exciting art that neighbors who have not shown up for the meetings might have approved.

If neighbors find a mural objectionable because it is ugly or disturbing, they can file a nuisance law suit.  There is no need for the City to enforce aesthetic sensibilities.    

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