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Wade Burleson campaign signs appear along West Garriott on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 . 

Current Enid city ordinance on political sign placement

Wade Burleson campaign signs appear along West Garriott on Wednesday, March 23, 2022 . 

Current Enid city ordinance on political sign placement

ENID, Okla. — The city of Enid won’t be enforcing its now-outdated pre-election time limits for placing political signs, ahead of a major overhaul to city sign regulations that’s already planned for next month.

City Attorney Carol Lahman said she’s directed the city code department to not enforce a decades-old ordinance on campaign signs, in following a 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on local sign regulations.

The current Enid Municipal Code ordinance holds that political signs can be placed beginning on the date when a candidate files for election; must be removed within 30 days of the election or runoff; and not be placed within 300 feet of a polling station on election day.

Lahman said she’d include striking the ordinance, which has been on the books for at least 30 years, from the myriad proposed changes to Enid’s current zoning ordinances on signs, inspections and permitting.

“We’re not enforcing it,” she said Wednesday, “and I am going to recommend that we take out the political sign regulations and just go with the standard sign regulations.”

Election signs are among those that don’t require a permit if under a specific size limit, also including official flags, traffic control/construction signs.

Signs would only need to be removed if they impede on a public right of way, Lahman said.

“If the sign isn’t safe, (like) if the sign is going to block a sight triangle, then we take it down,” she said.

Enid city commissioners are set to vote on the revised sign ordinance section on April 5, after the city’s metropolitan planning commission recommended approval on Monday.

Oklahoma’s statewide candidate filing for the 2022 primary and general elections is over a week later, from April 13-15. Candidates filing for state, federal, legislative or judicial offices must file with the secretary of the state election board at the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, according to the election board.

Any political signs for federal candidates who have not yet filed with the state election board can remain in yards, Lahman said.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Jackson Lahmeyer has had campaign yard signs in Enid since last year.

“Americans love to express their support for certain political candidates, especially through yard signs,” the Tulsa native said in a statement to the News & Eagle on Wednesday. “The city of Enid’s ordinance is outdated and should be changed as soon as possible.”

Oklahoma currently has two statutes on the books about political signs — they cannot block a public right-of-way and must be placed at least 300 feet from a polling place on election days.

“I’m going to rely on the state” about sign regulation, Lahman said, and the attorney general can figure out whether that survives the 2015 Supreme Court case.”

Lahman was referring to the court’s 2015 ruling for Reed v. Town of Gilbert, which upended local sign regulations.

Courts now determine if a regulation is either content-based or content-neutral. The latter doesn’t target a sign’s message, but rather the placement, safety and size, for example, Lahman said.

Regulations for messages based on content — messages about race, sex, politics, etc.— would warrant “strict scrutiny,” Lahman said.

“The important thing is, we’re not regulating the message,” she said. “We’re not going to prosecute something that the United States Supreme Court has said is unconstitutional. And I think we’ll be fine.”

Many courts have since ruled that regulations on timing-based placement are largely content-based, such as limiting putting up a candidate’s yard sign up to 45 days before an election is held.

Singling out political signs shows that it is a content-based regulation, she said.

The FEC states that state or local laws on placement and location of signs on roads “are not superseded by federal law.”

Garfield County Election Board’s rules on candidates’ signs do not include time-based limits, said Dr. Dustin Baylor, a Chisholm Public Schools board member who was elected in 2021.

The county does have rules on distance from roads and locations from polling sites, Baylor said, while some covenant neighborhoods don’t allow signs at all.

GOP congressional candidate Wade Burleson’s campaign manager, Brian Tonnell, said the city ordinance isn’t specific enough with its timing, since congressional elections have multiple filing requirements at the state and federal levels.

Burleson, who would officially file for office in April with the state, already filed his declaration of candidacy with the Federal Elections Commission on Jan. 29. Tonnell said that a week earlier, the campaign had received verbal approval to start putting up signs from an employee at the city’s code enforcement office, who had shown them a printout of the current sign ordinance.

“Because this is a federal race and because we had a positive answer from the city already, we took it to mean that filing for candidacy with the Federal Election Commission would meet the requirements of the city ordinance,” Tonnell said in an email Wednesday.

A deputy campaign manager also emailed the city attorney two weeks ago asking to clarify about the filing date, and Tonnell said the campaign hadn’t received a reply as of Wednesday.

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Ewald is copy editor and city/education reporter for the Enid News & Eagle.

Writer, doer and overthinker. OU grad, California native with Oklahoma heritage.

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