A three-judge panel led by Chief Judge William Pryor found that the district court erred in two respects: it allowed a facial challenge to the entire 1982 sign code when the plaintiffs had standing to challenge only one provision, and it wrongly accepted a stipulation that the provision at issue was content-based.
The dispute centers on two signs owned by Multimedia Technologies near Interstate 85 in Atlanta. The signs were permitted in 1993, but after Atlanta adopted a new sign code in 2015 — prompted by the Supreme Court's decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert — a Georgia state court ruled the original permits were "unlawful at inception" under the old code's restrictions on off-site signs. Atlanta then ordered the signs removed and twice issued arrest citations to Geoffrey Anderson, the president of Multimedia, and Harrison Coleman, Peach Hospitality's registered agent, when the signs were not taken down.
Multimedia Technologies, its president Geoffrey Anderson, and property owner Peach Hospitality of Georgia sued in federal court, arguing the 1982 code was unconstitutional. The district court agreed, granting summary judgment and enjoining enforcement.
The Eleventh Circuit vacated the summary judgment and injunction. The court held that Section 16-28.019(7) of the 1982 code — which restricted "general advertising signs" near freeways and expressways, defined as signs advertising businesses "not principally conducted . . . on the premises" — falls squarely within City of Austin's holding that on-premises/off-premises distinctions are content-neutral. "The substantive message itself is irrelevant to the application" of the sign code, the court wrote, quoting City of Austin. Enforcement "requires only that Atlanta determine that a sign is a general advertising sign, which turns on the sign's location, not its content."
The court rejected Multimedia's argument that the provision was distinguishable from City of Austin because it did not cover signs advertising "persons." Even assuming that narrower scope, the court held, subsection (7) "does not single out any topic or subject matter for differential treatment." The court acknowledged that enforcing the code "requires reading a billboard to determine whether it directs readers to the property on which it stands or to some other, offsite location," but held that "a rule that holds that a regulation cannot be content neutral if it requires reading the sign at issue . . . is too extreme an interpretation of [the Supreme] Court's precedent."
On standing, the court found that Multimedia could challenge only subsection (7) — the sole provision the state court relied on in invalidating its permits. Multimedia "provided no evidence that it suffered injury from other provisions of the 1982 sign code," the court held, and therefore lacked standing to mount a facial challenge to the rest of the code.
The panel remanded for the district court to apply the correct standard of review for content-neutral restrictions: whether subsection (7) is "narrowly tailored to serve a significant governmental interest." The parties had not briefed that question, and the court declined to resolve it as "a court of review, not a court of first view."