Mahoney Baloney2.jpg

Garfield Heights made Frank Wagner remove this sign from his yard in 2011.

(Photo courtesy of Curt Hartman)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Here's a message -- imagine it as a sixteen-square-foot sign -- for the city of Garfield Heights to read:

Frank Wagner appears to have won.

He took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which today threw out a lower court's ruling that effectively banned Wagner, a local activist, from having a large sign on his yard criticizing a Garfield Heights councilwoman.

Garfield Heights had made Wagner take down the sign from his Oak Park Boulevard front yard. The city said his sign violated an ordinance designed to protect aesthetics and minimize confusion with street and traffic signs and signals used by drivers and pedestrians. Signs had to be harmonious with their surrounding environments, the ordinance said.

But Wagner, 55, challenged the city's arguments and pushed hard on his right to express a political opinion. And today, based upon a series of Supreme Court actions in this and a similar case, Wagner appears to have the right to his sign.

But before Garfield Heights can say "there goes the neighborhood," it should know this. Wagner has no plans to replant the previously banned sign, or any other sign, in his front yard, he says.

"But now I know I have the right, and so does anybody else who wants to."

These signs were posted in Frank Wagner's yard for an illustration in his appeal -- to show that such a display would be allowed under the Garfield Heights ordinance, yet his single, somewhat larger sign would not.

The sign standoff began in 2011, a year after a group of citizens including Wagner, a lifelong Garfield Heights resident, won a ballot initiative to outlaw red-light cameras in the city. Wagner, who served on the city council in the 1980s, had also tried to get rid of a new fee imposed on households for garbage collection. He said he thought the cameras and the trash fee were bad ideas, and thought a particular councilwoman who had supported both ideas needed to be voted out in the city election.

So Wagner, a federal employee, posted a sign urging that the councilwoman, Tracy Mahoney, be defeated. (She won but was defeated in a 2013 election.)

The sign was written as a mathematical equation: "Do the math. Traffic Camera's (sic) + Rubbish Tax = Mahoney Baloney."

The city sent Wagner a letter telling him his sign violated local law because it exceeded the allowable size for political signs, six square feet in area and no more than four feet in height. If he didn't remove his sign, he was told, he could be fined $1,000 a day.

Wagner complied. But he sued the city, and in 2013 won an initial victory when U.S. District Court Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. ruled that the city's sign ordinance violated Wagner's constitutional right to free speech.

Garfield Heights appealed. Last August, the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the lower court had it wrong. The sign ordinance "serves significant government interests, is narrowly tailored to promote those interests, and leaves open alternative channels of communication," the appeals court said.

Different appeals courts had already addressed similar sign ordinances differently. This left the broader question -- local authority for safety and aesthetics versus free-speech rights -- ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court. It so happened that the Supreme Court had already agreed to hear such a case, from Arizona -- Reed v. Town of Gilbert. So Wagner's attorneys filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, too, seeking to piggyback on the similarities and overlapping issues in Reed v. Gilbert.

The Arizona case concerned temporary signs giving directions to services of a church that lacked a permanent home and used different sites each week. The town of Gilbert tried to restrict how early and how long such signs could be posted, and cited the church for exceeding the time limits and for failing to include an event date on its signs.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on June 18 for the church, with Justice Clarence Thomas authoring the opinion. Thomas wrote that a sign ordinance "narrowly tailored to the challenges of protecting the safety of pedestrians, drivers, and passengers"-- such as warning signs marking hazards on private property, signs directing traffic, or street numbers associated with private houses-- might pass constitutional muster. But, he said, the "signs at issue in this case, including political and ideological signs and signs for events, are far removed from those purposes."

As for the aesthetic argument, Thomas wrote that "temporary directional signs are no greater an eyesore than ideological or political ones" that the town allowed.

If the parallels with Wagner's case weren't obvious, the court made them so today. It granted certiorari to Wagner, a term that normally would mean it had decided to consider his case. But since the legal question was seemingly settled already in the Arizona, case, the court simultaneously took additional action. It vacated the Sixth Circuit ruling against Wagner and sent the case back to that panel for reconsideration "in light of Reed v. Town of Gilbert."

In other words, the Supreme Court agreed that Wagner presented valid questions but that they were already answered -- very recently -- in the Arizona case.

"So they already agreed on all the issues we need in our case," said Curt Hartman, a Cincinnati-based attorney for Wagner.

It will take 25 days for the Supreme Court to issue its order, Hartman said, and the matter still won't be over officially until the Sixth Circuit reconsiders its decision from last August. As is typical in appeals, the appellate court could wind up sending the case back where it started -- to the district court -- for final resolution.

But the district court agreed with Wagner in the first place.

The law director and the outside law firm handling this case for Garfield Heights have not returned a reporter's calls.

Wagner said in a telephone interview that he was humbled that "an average guy could take a case before the Supreme Court." He said he has no need to put up his sign again. But "knowing that we have the right to put up signs that express our opinions is an important right for anybody in the United States," he said.

His message for the citizens of Garfield Heights, and for the city itself? "Don't let anybody trample on your constitutional rights. And the city of Garfield Heights -- don't trample on anybody's rights."