If ever you say the word “mural” to Commissioner Randy Leonard, he’ll most likely respond with “Mirador.”

Back in the summer of 2003, during his first term in office and as the commissioner in charge of the Bureau of Development Services, he heard about the problems the SE “community store” was having with its mural. Because of the city’s strict anti-billboard code, the Mirador was told that its outside mural was against the law. Leonard attempted to keep enforcement off of the store while he negotiated a compromise on the sign law that would allow for murals like Mirador’s.

But that attempt ran counter to then-Mayor Vera Katz’s hard-line opposition to billboards—she despised them so much that she was willing to sacrifice the city’s murals in order to ban them. A 1999 court ruling held that it was unconstitutional for the city to differentiate between murals and commercial billboards, so the city was forced to regulate murals through the commercial sign code.

For the Mirador and other similar buildings, that meant they had to cover their mural with plywood in order to stay within the law. For muralists, it meant they had few legal canvasses.

The late ’90s challenge was largely the doing of media giant Clear Channel, which owns most of the billboard spaces around town, who sued because they felt muralists were being illegally “preferred” over billboards. After the 1999 ruling, the city still limited billboards, but allowed some murals through a public arts project. Clear Channel sued again in 2004.

On May 8, Multnomah Circuit Court Judge Michael Marcus ruled that Clear Channel wasn’t entitled to any compensation, and at the urging of city attorneys, he clarified that Portland could, in fact, differentiate between murals and billboards, as long as it wasn’t based on the content of the signs.

“[N]othing that I am aware of prevents the City from ‘preferring’ art over commercial speech,” Marcus wrote, “any more than it may choose to prefer other forms of commerce to ‘adult’ book stores, quiet forms of recreation to automobile races, backpacking to ATVs, public transportation to individual automobiles, [or] vibrant commercial occupancies to abandoned buildings.”

In other words, IN YOUR FACE, CLEAR CHANNEL!

Download Marcus’ complete ruling here, if you dare. (pdf)

Still, though, the language is somewhat vague—because he’s a judge, and not a city attorney, Marcus couldn’t explicitly say what steps the city should take in order to draft a constitutionally sound code that treats billboards and murals differently. So officials in city hall are working with mural advocates to write a new policy. They’ve met once, and there could be a draft policy produced within months.

“I’ll support whatever we can do to remove the plywood from the mural at Mirador,” Leonard says.