Council takes aim at brightly colored public menace

It's time to clear your mind of all the problems you think the city has and focus on the real public menace: downtown newspaper racks in various colors and materials. What's that? They're not a public hazard? Well, don't tell that to City Council, which has a revised proposal to clamp down on dilapidated, poorly constructed, abandoned and non-green news racks in the central business district.

According to KHOU, downtown boosters have complained about the state of downtown news racks for years. We can understand why: Quite a few of them are in pretty bad shape, covered with stickers and graffiti, or empty most of the time. But that's not all, apparently — they could also be harming us, City Councilwoman Pam Holm says: "Visually, you see clutter. But by the same token, it also becomes a safety issue." Sure, we guess so; fortunately, no news rack has tried to attack us yet.

The city's answer to the problem of renegade racks is a proposed ordinance calling for tougher regulation of downtown news racks, including requiring operators to keep the racks registered with the city. The racks would also have to conform to fairly stringent size and weight restrictions, would have to be made of steel and would have to be painted forest green. Ranks of news racks more than 10 feet long would be prohibited, and in case you were worried, the proposal also requires that "the design of a newsrack shall not create a danger to the persons using the newsrack in a reasonably foreseeable manner." Whew.

There are some problems with the proposal — namely, newspapers would lose the marketing opportunity of painting their news racks with their colors and logos (publications would be allowed one sign per rack, no larger than 15 by 17 inches, to display their names, logos and information under the ordinance). "Our news rack is our trademark," Randy Schawe with USA Today told Channel 11. "Our white news rack ... is a registered trademark for USA Today. Thus, we lose our trademark and our branding." Not to mention the fact that the ordinance would significantly cut back on accidental street art, like the series of racks above (from flickr user yesitsfast).