On the afternoon of April 24, Ryan Price walked out of her mother-in-law's Santa Ana home to her car. What happened next would launch Price into a three-month legal tiff involving her family, City Hall and the 1st Amendment.
Attached to the windshield wiper of her silver 2000 Acura Integra was a traffic ticket. Price looked up and down the residential street in bafflement -- she had not parked near a stop sign, a fire hydrant or in a red zone. The car was within a permissible distance from the curb.
The ticket itself was just as mysterious. Cryptically it noted that she had violated city ordinance 41-1301(a) at 3:27 p.m.
Confused, Price walked back to her mother-in-law's apartment. The two searched on the Internet and found out why Price was fined $54.
Her car was ticketed because she had a "For Sale" sign in its rear window.
"I was completely shocked because I've never heard such a thing," said the 30-year-old middle school English teacher. Beyond her outrage over the law itself, Price -- who lives in Covina -- wondered: "How I was to know that I wasn't allowed to post [the sign] in the city of Santa Ana?"
Price had run afoul of a law that many cities have adopted to cope with problems that "For Sale" signs can cause by cluttering up neighborhoods and distracting drivers. Those laws have been under a legal cloud, however, since a federal court in 2000 tossed out a similar ordinance in Los Angeles.
Representing a man who was fined $35 for placing two "For Sale" signs in his car that was parked on a city street, the American Civil Liberties Union successfully argued that the law violated his free-speech rights.
"The court cannot fathom how a sign in a parked car is more dangerous than the same sign in a moving car," Judge A. Howard Matz wrote in the ruling, Burkow vs. City of Los Angeles. "As to the indisputably important 'aesthetic' concerns, defendants could minimize alleged harms with measures far short of outright prohibition."
Chastened by the ruling, many other cities have backed away from similar laws.
The city of Orange, for example, has asked the Police Department to not enforce its law because of the Los Angeles ruling and will consider repealing the law, said City Atty. David DeBerry.
Orange is exploring other means -- such as posting "No Overnight Parking" signs on major thoroughfares -- to deal with the problem, which can be serious, DeBerry said, citing on-street parking near a youth soccer field that is consistently taken up by cars for sale.
