Time. Place. Manner. Case law shows that the legal limits of monitoring free speech and assembly go hand in hand with the objective rules a city can adopt to regulate signage and art—including murals—used by privately owned businesses.
Over the past nine months, Solvang’s staff and legal advisors have cited U.S. Supreme Court cases, including Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015), to elected officials and appointed committee members during hearings about a proposed code update meant to streamline the city’s signage permitting procedures, unaltered since 2012.
“This area of what you can regulate on signs is a whole huge body of case law. … There’s decades of case law,” City Attorney Chelsea O’Sullivan told the City Council at its Jan. 12 meeting. “Content-based restrictions are subject to a very high standard of review under federal law. … Basically, all content-based restrictions get struck down by a court.”
Staff presented a draft ordinance to get city officials’ feedback before putting forward a final proposal sometime in March. The signage code cleanup has been in the works since last March, Community Development Director Rafael Castillo reminded the council.
At the meeting, Councilmember Elizabeth Orona echoed concerns that members of Solvang’s Design Review Committee previously voiced at an August 2025 hearing.
“We have no method to find aesthetic consistency between a sign and its building?” Orona said.
She asked staff to expand on its assertion that the color of a sign counts as content and therefore can’t be held to objective design standards.
“With color for signs, it gets a little tricky because, for businesses, it can be their logo,” City Attorney O’Sullivan said. “We’re not [currently] dictating people’s logo colors on that level. … Under our current regime, we have not done that for logos and the content of signs. I would hope it’s in the tenant’s interest to have a coherent look for their building.”
“It might be in the tenant’s interest to draw more attention to their sign,” Orona responded, “and make it neon paint as opposed to neon fluorescent.”
To streamline the sign permitting process for businesses and other applicants, the draft ordinance shortens the process administered by staff, rather than maintain the Design Review Committee’s current jurisdiction over signs and requiring public hearings.
Clashes between applicants and the committee over signage have cropped up in the past, including in 2023 when a local juice bar owner successfully appealed the committee’s denial of one of his shop’s signs for subjective reasons outside of the city’s objective standards.
While the City Council sided with staff on streamlining the sign approval process into an administrative procedure, it shared the Design Review Committee’s view that art murals on private property should go through a public hearing procedure.
“I will take the council’s direction on this, but I will be somewhat wounded on this hill. I strongly urge that murals go through city staff,” Castillo said. “I’ve seen way too many councils, … commissions, and boards, get hung up on the content of a mural, and it brings out the worst in humanity to argue over what a message is of a mural, versus being very streamlined and straightforward.”
Castillo added that the city of Solvang has never codified a formal permitting process for murals.
City Attorney O’Sullivan told the council that permitting murals for private businesses via a public hearing route with the Design Review Committee does work as long as it sticks to weighing in on objective standards like size and location, rather than the mural’s content.
After Councilmember Orona suggested leaving murals out of the draft ordinance, O’Sullivan said that staff “can certainly take it out and put it in more of an art ordinance.”
“That would be a different effort, but I just want to preview that we’re not going to avoid the First Amendment by doing that,” O’Sullivan said. “You can put it in a public art ordinance, but the same speech rules are going to apply no matter which bucket you put it in. Murals often have speech. It’s an expression. Freedom of expression in the First Amendment is not just words. It’s also art; pictures.”
“Well, some people consider graffiti art these days, but I don’t think that’s what we want in Solvang,” Orona said.
This article appears in January 15 – January 22, 2026.