Village attorney: 'COVID Death Scoreboard' is protected speech, can remain 30 days
For nearly a century, Triangle Park in Northbrook has been used as a public forum.
Like it or not, residents will have about three more weeks to view its latest offering.
On Sept. 18 Lee and Nancy Goodman of the Peaceful Communities volunteer organization unveiled a "COVID Death Scoreboard" installed in the parkway at the intersection of Shermer Road and Walters Avenue.
A 4-foot-by-4-foot plywood sign painted with the heading, "We're No. 1" and "Donald J. Trump, President" at the bottom, the display will be updated daily with the number of deaths in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Lee Goodman, an organizer with Peaceful Communities.
As allowed by Northbrook's Standard Operating Procedure, Greenwood said the sign will be in place for roughly 30 days.
"It's not a political display, per se, it's not a campaign display, but I think it's a very important issue: How well is our federal government protecting our people in the United States?" he said.
Initially formed as the Northbrook Peace Committee after the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goodman has since focused on such issues as gun rights and immigration.
Members of the group have participated in various demonstrations, Goodman said. He's been to the U.S.-Mexico border several times to see asylum-seekers there, he added.
Goodman and Peaceful Communities have previously applied with the village to install displays. The first opposed the Iraq War.
Past displays have been vandalized. He'd hoped to avoid that this time, but by the evening of Sept. 22 the COVID display had been vandalized four times, twice on Tuesday - once between 7:20-8 p.m., Greenwood said.
That nighttime spray-painting happened toward the start of Tuesday's Northbrook board of trustees meeting. The board devoted nearly an hour to the topic that has created at least one altercation between people and, according to several of the 19 dissenting emails (and 3 supportive) read by Village President Sandy Frum, a traffic accident.
The president and six trustees did not all approve of the method of the sign's message, but all supported the importance of protecting First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, and continuing Triangle Park as a forum for them.
Their opinions followed village attorney Steve Elrod's thorough examination of the First Amendment.
"The bottom line is, so long as there is a public forum, the village must allow all forms of noncommercial speech - religious symbols, political speech, political campaign speech. The village cannot assert its subjective judgment on the displays. It cannot make decisions based on the content of those displays," Elrod said in summary.
"However, they all will be limited by the time, place and manner restrictions within our Standing Operating Procedure and, importantly, because this is a public forum, based on the First Amendment jurisprudence that I recited earlier, neither the village board nor the village staff have the authority, in my opinion, to remove this particular display based on its content," he said.