Billboard company taking Westfield to trial

A judge has decided to let Indianapolis-based GEFT Outdoor pick up where it left off three years ago and finish a partially constructed billboard near U.S. 31—despite the fact the sign violates Westfield’s city code.

GEFT Outdoor, a company that builds and operates billboards, started building a digital sign at 16708 Dean Road in fall 2017. According to court records, city officials demanded work stop because Westfield’s sign ordinance prohibits advertising for off-premises activities and GEFT had not received a local permit exempting it from that rule. GEFT founder and owner Jeff Lee filed a lawsuit that November claiming the Westfield ordinance was unconstitutional. Nearly three years later, Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana has ruled in his favor.

“The judge granted me the right to complete the digital billboard, and I get to have a trial on my damages beyond the completion of the digital billboard,” Lee said. “We’re talking about significant amounts of money.”

Westfield city spokeswoman Vicki Gardner said in an email that the city did not have a comment on the lawsuit, but officials had already filed a notice of appeal.

GEFT Outdoors’ original complaint against the city of Westfield, Westfield’s board of zoning appeals and Hamilton County alleged the ordinance violated his First Amendment rights by restricting his sign’s advertisements to only those business activities occurring on the same property as the billboard.

A federal judge ruled in GEFT’s favor in 2016 on similar grounds when Lee sued the city of Indianapolis for banning digital billboards. Lee is also planning to take action after the Monroe County Board of Zoning Appeals denied his digital billboard near Bloomington in March 2019.

“… If I’m operating in a municipality and they are unlawfully restricting citizens’ constitutional rights I will bring those to the forefront,” Lee said.

For all its similarities to Lee’s past litigation, GEFT’s case against Westfield evolved to include additional claims related to a December 2017 altercation.

Court records state GEFT workers ignored the city’s initial orders to stop and continued building the 50-foot-tall, 14 x 48-foot, double-sided, digital billboard. After a few hours, a city inspector and two police officers arrived on the scene and demanded work stop.

After the officers and inspector left, GEFT’s workers resumed working on the sign. Court documents indicate Westfield attorney Brian Zaiger then arrived on-scene and threatened the workers with arrest if they continued ignoring the city’s orders.

“Those shenanigans have come home to roost a bit,” Lee said.

On Sept. 30, Judge Pratt granted GEFT summary judgement on those counts related to Westfield’s sign ordinance to allow the case to proceed to trial.

However, the judge did not grant Lee’s additional claims that Zaiger’s unlawful threat of arrest was an affront to the due process of law. Pratt agreed with the city’s assertion that Zaiger’s actions did not rise to the level of violating the constitution, and that it was more a matter of “a dispute between two strong-willed men under the circumstances here where one ultimately yielded his position.”

A trial date to determine damages has been set for Oct. 26. Lee said the total amount will be up to the judge, but he’s expecting to claim “many, many millions of dollars” in damages. He added that the case will look not only at the billboard on Dean Road, immediately adjacent to U.S. 31, but also eight other properties where GEFT has plans to eventually build more signs.

Lee later issued a statement by email to say GEFT Outdoor is hoping to find a “win-win resolution regarding this matter that does not cost the taxpayers of Westfield many millions of dollars.  It is our hope that sensible minds will emerge in local government that respect the constitutional rights of its citizens instead of those who resort to the use of bully tactics in an attempt to silence our most precious constitutional right of all. . . our freedom of speech.”

Whatever the outcome, Lee said he plans to finish construction of the billboard in question “as fast as humanly possible.”

“I’m not an anti-regulation guy, but I am a guy that strongly believes if you want to take a citizens’ property rights, you have to do it lawfully,” Lee said.