Neighborhood Enterprises, Inc., et al. v. City of St. Louis, et al., No. 10-1937 (8th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CaseNeighborhood Enterprises, Inc., Sanctuary In the Ordinary, and Jim Roos (collectively, Sanctuary) filed suit against, inter alia, the City of St. Louis and St. Louis Board of Adjustment challenging the Board's denial of a sign permit. At issue was whether the district court erred in granting summary judgment to the City and the Board, finding, inter alia, that the zoning code's restrictions on signs withstood constitutional scrutiny with respect to the Board's denial of Sanctuary's sign permit. As a preliminary matter, the court held that Sanctuary had Article III standing. The court also held that the zoning code's definition of "sign" was impermissibly content-based and therefore, strict scrutiny applied. The court further held that the City's sign code failed strict scrutiny where the sign code was not narrowly tailored to accomplish the City's asserted interests in aesthetics and traffic safety, nor has the court's case law recognized those interests as compelling. Accordingly, the zoning code's definition of "sign" violated the Free Speech Clause. The court held that because the challenged provisions of Chapter 26.68 of the zoning code were impermissibly content based and failed strict scrutiny, the court reversed and remanded for further proceedings. The court finally held that because the district court did not address the issue of whether the provisions were severable from the remainder of the code, the matter was remanded to the district court for it to consider this issue.
Court Description: Civil case - Civil rights. Plaintiffs had standing to challenge the constitutionality of provisions of the City of St. Louis's zoning code which were used to deny their application for a sign permit; challenged sign provisions of the zoning code were content-based restrictions, subject to strict scrutiny review; the provisions were not narrowly tailed to accomplish the City's asserted interests in aesthetics and traffic safety, and those interest are not compelling; as a result, the challenged provisions of the zoning code violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment; because the district court, in upholding the provisions, did not address the issue of whether they were severable from the remainder of the code, the matter must be remanded to the district court to permit it to address the severability issue in the first instance.
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