Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone has proposed more stringent limits on commercial displays in response to the safety scare that erupted a month ago after mysterious advertisements in the Boston area caused a city-wide bomb crisis.
Emergency response teams, some of them from Somerville, responded to the apparent bomb threat on Jan. 31, but soon discovered that the devices were flashing electronic gadgets advertising "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a show on Cartoon Network.
If Curtatone's proposal passes, it will guard against future mishaps by instituting a set of regulations for all commercial displays. In addition, promoters will have to gain approval from the police department before distributing their advertisements, which will require providing information about their nature, location and the people involved in placing them.
Somerville's Director of Communications Tom Champion said that these guidelines would ensure that all advertisers are held to the same standard. He compared the proposed rules to the laws that govern street vendors.
"The purpose of this proposal is to regulate this kind of commercial marketing action so that its practitioners are on a more level playing field with all the hundreds and even thousands of businesses that advertise in Somerville every day using traditional, legal and licensed and permitted methods," he said.
Curtatone submitted the proposal to the Somerville Board of Aldermen earlier this month. "It's currently under review by the Legislative Matters subcommittee of the board," Maeghan Silverberg, a public information officer for Curtatone, said.
President of the Board of Aldermen Robert Trane, who serves on the subcommittee, said that he and his colleagues are fully behind the measure.
One crucial feature of the suggested rules is that they hold advertisers accountable to the government.
As a result, Trane said that city officials will no longer be forced to make decisions without sufficient knowledge of the situation, as they had to do in January.
"We should be able to know what's going on so we don't end up with another public safety crisis on our hands," he said.
The proposal, however, "explicitly exempts" artists engaged in noncommercial expression, no matter what medium they employ, Champion said.
He drew a distinction between commercial organizations' rights to free speech and those of individuals, asserting that the mayor's office had no intention to interfere with the latter.
Commercial speech has always been a separate entity from individual free speech, according to Lecturer Phil Primack, who teaches an Experimental College course called Media Law and Ethics. This distinction has meant that commercial free speech has lacked the bulwark of constitutional empowerment that private citizens enjoy.
"The prevailing rule for most legal histories was that advertising had no first amendment protection," Primack said.
In fact, he said, the idea of commercial free speech had been largely nonexistent until a series of Supreme Court decisions in the past 30 years began establishing a still-nebulous area of protection for commercial displays, though Primack said that there is still "no constitutional guarantee."
Primack also pointed out that the widespread fear that people were in danger, not the substance of the advertisement, caused the commotion surrounding the Cartoon Network advertisements.
As a reflection of this, the proposal does not necessarily limit what advertisers display, only how they do it.
"The issue here wasn't the advertising," Primack said. "It wasn't a case of, 'We don't like the ad.'"
Curtatone had originally sought punitive measures against Cartoon Network through a lawsuit, since the incident cost the city of Somerville around $25,000, Champion told the Daily earlier this month.
But Curtatone abandoned the suit after the Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley's office reached a $2 million agreement with Cartoon Network parent company Turner Broadcasting. Half of the money will supply restitution, while the other half will provide "goodwill funds" for security and education initiatives, according to a press release from the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office. Silverberg said Somerville is "very satisfied" with the agreement.
Under the terms of the agreement, Somerville will receive $69,113.
