Huntington Council Targets Tabloid Porn

The Huntington Beach City Council gave preliminary approval Tuesday night to an ordinance that officials hope will effectively remove sexually explicit weekly tabloids from news racks on public property while dodging a costly and lengthy legal test of the First Amendment.

The ordinance, approved 7 to 0 on first reading, was prompted by a group of citizens, led by local church elders, who asked the City Council last month to ban all pornography from the city.

Members of the group became alarmed by the proliferation of what they consider pornographic materials because anybody--children included--can buy the tabloids from numerous news racks, including six outside the downtown Huntington Beach post office and two across the street from the downtown branch library.

Group leaders said Tuesday night that although the ordinance is a good first start, it does not solve the problem because it doesn’t prevent the tabloids from being on the street where youths can buy them. They intend to work with the City Council before the ordinance receives its second reading, or final approval, which is expected at the Feb. 6 council meeting.

Working on Amendments

If approved then, the ordinance would take effect March 6. In the meantime, the city and citizens also will work with state Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), who is working on amendments to a bill that already outlaws the tabloids from news racks within several hundred feet of public schools.

No one representing the half-dozen or so contested publications spoke at the meeting.

Most of the tabloids targeted by the ordinance feature nude men and women in sexually explicit poses, many of them in personal ads. All of them list 976 telephone numbers for so-called dial-a-porn.

The ordinance requires any publication sold from a public sidewalk vending machine--from the daily Los Angeles Times to the weekly Huntington Beach Independent--to obtain a city permit.

It also limits the size, number and location of news racks in Huntington Beach and requires the news rack owner to carry proof of liability insurance that provides for $1 million per occurence. No fees for the permit will be charged, and only one application per newspaper distributor is required, no matter how many news racks that distributor uses.

Survived Challenges

Based on a state appellate court decision upholding news-rack restrictions and upon a Glendale ordinance that has already survived several legal challenges, Huntington Beach’s ordinance was designed to avoid “taking on the First Amendment,” Councilman Tom Mays has said.

Huntington Beach several years ago lost an expensive court battle with massage parlor operators in the city’s quest to rid them from Beach Boulevard on the grounds that doing so was an infringement of free speech. City leaders did not want to rattle the “legitimate newspapers,” nor did they wish to fight another costly battle that might also fail to “stand constitutional muster,” City Attorney Gail C. Hutton wrote to the City Council.

“The advantage of adopting the ordinance,” she wrote, “is limited to providing for identification of the vendor for purposes of subsequent prosecution should the vendor purvey material violative of the obscenity laws, the avoidance of unnecessary obstruction of public sidewalks and the provision for insurance and indemnity should a third party be injured as a result of the placement of the vending machines in the public streets.”

Hutton’s ordinance proposal concluded, “There may be no prior restraint placed upon the disseminator of printed materials; therefore the ordinance is ‘content neutral’ in its application.”

Sets Priorities

It also sets priorities by which the city’s public works director shall approve the permits. First priority will be given to news racks used for sale of publications that have been judged in court to be newspapers of general circulation for Orange County.