Mobile Home Park Resident’s Fight to Keep His Flagpole Doesn’t Fly on Appeal

Ruling that flagpoles and not flags were at issue, a state appellate court has concluded that a mobile home park tenant must take down a 20-foot high steel flagpole he had erected outside his home.

In a decision released Monday, the 4th District Court of Appeal upheld a lower court’s order that Pete Weissman remove the pole and patriotic memorabilia that the self-employed plumber and electrician had installed in February, 1983, on the lot he rents at the Fountain Valley Mobilehome Park.

The park’s owner, Gerard J. Dougher, had argued that the flagpole and assorted decorations were a public nuisance that violate the park rules.

Weissman countered that erecting the flagpole and displaying his decorations--which include a woodcarving of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima--were expressions of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Weissman’s attorney, Stuart M. Parker, used that and an array of other arguments to try to persuade the court that Dougher’s rules are illegal.

But the court found that unlike his flag, Weissman’s arguments didn’t fly.

“Weissman complains that the order requiring removal of the flagpole violates his constitutional right of free speech and expression,” Appellate Justice Thomas F. Crosby Jr. wrote in a unanimous opinion for a three-member panel. “He is wrong for several reasons.”

“First, no real First Amendment issue exists. The thorn in this particular rose is the flagpole, not the flag,” Crosby wrote. The justice observed that Weissman had, without objection from the landlord, flown a flag on his lot before he had the steel flagpole implanted in a concrete slab, “and nothing suggests that Weissman cannot now unfurl the flag as he did before.”

The court placed substantial weight on the fact that Weissman had signed a lease agreeing to Dougher’s guidelines several months before installing the flagpole. The guidelines prohibited “non-growing objects” in the yard areas.

“The alleged right of a member of a closed community to behave contrary to rules he agreed to follow is the issue before us,” Crosby wrote.

Weissman, who has lived at the park since 1976, could not be reached for comment.

Parker described the ruling as “pretty brutal.”

“It’s a very unfortunate decision. Weissman committed no offense except being a different kind of person with a different kind of expression,” Parker said.

The ruling, Parker said, represents “a political climate that is no longer friendly to the rights of the individual.”

Dougher, however, called the decision “beautiful.”

“I hope this puts to bed once and for all the idea that we have any objections to the American flag.”

Dougher, who owns 12 other mobile home parks, all but one of them in Orange County, said that “we’ve had an awful lot of bad press on that because Mr. Weissman pretended we were objecting to the American flag.”

Parker said he would have to confer with his client before considering any other legal action to try to keep the flagpole in place.