Council to propose news rack ordinance

The Las Vegas City Council will introduce Monday an ordinance that would impose a $25-per-year permit fee on each news rack.

A similar Clark County measure is in effect along the Strip and in other resort-zoned areas. The areas that would be affected if the city measure passes are downtown arteries, including parts of Fremont Street, Charleston Boulevard, Las Vegas Boulevard, Paradise Road and Sahara Avenue and some residential roads.

"We are disappointed that the city would consider this," said Steve Coffeen, circulation director of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun.

Coffeen says the two daily newspapers have limited news rack presence along the Strip because it appeared the county ordinance was aimed at ridding the area of free adult-oriented publications, and the dailies did not want to be lumped in with them. Ironically, adult publications still utilize the Strip racks.

However, Coffeen said the city bill will have more of an impact on the local daily newspapers because there is a greater presence of the Review-Journal and Sun in news racks in the downtown area than there was on the Strip.

"It will have more of an impact on tourists who want a daily newspaper and go to the news racks only to find free (smut) publications," Coffeen said.

A city spokeswoman said the bill merely brings the city up to standard with what Clark County has done.

Bob Schell, assistant manager of the county's environmental and neighborhood services division, which regulates news racks, said the county ordinance and the one proposed by the city are not meant to restrict the public's access to the news.

"Our ordinance is not based on the contents inside the news racks, but rather on the news racks themselves," said Schell, whose agency monitors about 1,200 news racks covered by the ordinance. "The ordinance is content-neutral.

"The (county) ordinance is for the safety of pedestrians who were forced to walk in the streets because there were too many news racks on the sidewalks."

Others say the public safety issue is just a smoke screen.

Kent Lauer, executive director of the Nevada Press Association, said the city bill "seems to be treading on a very dangerous slope." His organization has been monitoring the news rack issue since the late 1980s.

"When government officials are crafting any news rack ordinance, they must make sure that distribution of the news receives the utmost protection guaranteed by the First Amendment," Lauer said.

Gloria Stonecipher, interim publisher of Las Vegas Press, which publishes three local papers, agrees that the this is a First Amendment issue.

"The $25 fee per rack will not have a dramatic impact on our company, but this is not a money issue," she said. "It is the city trying to regulate news publications, and that is not the city's responsibility."

The city measure would require news agencies to acquire a numbered identification permit for each rack from the city's Public Works Department at a cost of $25 apiece, with annual renewal fees of $25.

News racks without permits would be subject to seizure. The bill also seeks to boost the fees for agencies to recover seized racks from the current $50 charge to $75. The county charges $75 to release seized news racks to their owners.

There will be no discussion or action taken on the bill at Monday's City Council meeting. It will simply be introduced, read into the record and assigned to a recommending committee which will meet Aug. 3 at City Hall.

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