Whether the perpetrators realized they were littering or not, too many people have treated Solvang’s newspaper racks like trash bins in recent years, City Manager Randy Murphy told elected officials.
“They were attracting nuisance. People were leaving their garbage in them, and on them,” Murphy said at the Solvang City Council’s Jan. 26 meeting. “The news racks we had were old and derelict. They were covered in graffiti, and/or stickers.”
That evening, the council adopted a new ordinance with hopes of ensuring better newspaper rack upkeep, partly by shortening the permits granted to carriers of newspaper vending machines on public property from five years to one year, before requiring a renewal.
This update also replaces the city’s former newspaper permitting program, unaltered since 1998.
In October 2024, Solvang city staff informed the council that, during a fee program consultation, it came to staffers’ attention that the city had not enforced its newspaper rack permit policy since 2017. Out of 16 different publications staff observed around town, only six were permitted.
Complaints from the public describing news racks in Solvang as eyesores also stacked up prior to staff’s work on increasing enforcement, Murphy said at the January hearing.
“We’ve been working at this pretty much since I started,” Murphy said. “Local businesses complained. But our ordinance didn’t allow us really to do much. This is an opportunity to clean that up, to get the news racks compliant. And if not, it gives us the tools necessary to remove them.”
The new ordinance outlines a 10-day warning notice and removal process for news racks that fall out of compliance—including by not being “maintained in a clean and neat condition and in good repair at all times”—that’s under the Public Works Department’s jurisdiction, according to the staff report.
“We’ve made the sections clearer so the process for removing unpermitted news racks is clearer and modernized, and made some clean-up edits,” City Attorney Chelsea O’Sullivan said. “For example, the old ordinance—or current ordinance, I should say—inconsistently refers to the planning manager and the public works director as administering the news rack program. So this ordinance cleans that up. It’s clearly in the Public Works Department.”
Councilmember Elizabeth Orona motioned to adopt the policy update—approved with a 5-0 vote—on a first reading.
On the littering issue addressed in the ordinance, O’Sullivan noted during the hearing that there’s language about installation that will require news racks to be of a certain A-frame model, “so it won’t have a flat spot for people to just absentmindedly put their coffee cup on.”
“Hopefully that will solve that problem without having too many maintenance issues,” O’Sullivan said.
This article appears in January 29 – February 5, 2026.