The city of Flagstaff, Ariz., banned all commercial advertising at the local airport after a gun-range owner threatened to sue the city for prohibiting his ad specifically from appearing on government property.
The recent proposal came after Rob Wilson, owner of Timberline Firearms and Training, threatened to sue city leadership if Flagstaff Pulliam Airport continued censoring his ad in alleged violation of the Arizona constitution. Wilson’s latest application for his business’s silent, ten-second ad was rejected in May because the video depicted “violence or antisocial behavior,” according to the airport’s former advertising policy.
The video shows two still-frame images of firearms and a short clip of an individual safely shooting an indoor target with Wilson’s supervision.
Wilson ran his ad without a problem at the same airport in 2019, when the facility’s advertising was managed by a third-party vendor called Clear Channel. Although the Timberline owner submitted identical versions of the ad both times, the airport only displayed the two still images due to screen limitations on its TV monitors at the time.
The airport’s advertising has since been taken over by Flagstaff itself, where the local government ignored Wilson’s request to appeal the decision and was considering revising the policy to specifically enable its choice to reject the ad. Approving the policy revision, however, would have meant an impending lawsuit designed to safeguard Wilson’s free-speech and due-process rights.
Last week, the city council finalized the ban on paid advertising at Pulliam Airport and city recreation centers to work around the legal costs.
“Litigation on this could be very costly and will quickly exceed any benefit that we realize through the revenues that we’re talking about,” Flagstaff city manager Greg Clifton said at a council meeting on November 14, according to the local Arizona Daily Sun. Councilwoman Lori Matthews agreed, claiming the airport’s advertising revenues are “not something we depend on.”
John Thorpe of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative-libertarian think tank based in Phoenix that is representing Wilson in the case, said he believes the city’s decision to shut down all advertising “implicitly was an admission that what they were doing was indefensible” constitutionally.
“They are so dead set against free speech and against allowing him to express his message that they decided just to shut it all down and let nobody have ads,” Thorpe told National Review.
Thorpe said he’s looking into how much the advertising ban will cost the city, as the total losses remain unclear.
While local businesses are unable to run ads in what local officials designate as “nonpublic forums,” in which content can be legally regulated, one entity is exempted from the new ban. Discover Flagstaff, the city’s tourist information center, is still allowed to keep ads in those facilities.
Wilson is particularly frustrated over this specification and plans on buying ad space from Discover Flagstaff anyways “to make a point” that his community’s elected leaders are “not here to regulate free speech,” he told National Review.
“The bottom line is they’re just digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole as they try to convolute the rules to [approve] what would be an illegal blocking of someone’s rights,” Wilson added.