It’s the dream of many budding entrepreneurs: to start and grow a small business that serves the local community. That’s just what Joshua Rhines was doing in Missoula, Mont., with his small tech firm, CubCloud AI—until city leaders decided that businesses like his are the wrong kinds of businesses. Now, the Goldwater Institute is challenging a Missoula ordinance that effectively bans Rhines from growing his business anywhere in the city.
Rhines followed all the rules when it came to growing CubCloud, a small firm that provides AI and cloud computing infrastructure to local businesses. He invested nearly $2 million to establish its facilities with designs that complied with existing zoning. But in their zeal to ban data centers (CubCloud is a data center, albeit a very, very small one) Missoula leaders changed the rules, limiting data centers to a type of zoning that doesn’t even exist in the city. The problem: that’s a violation of Montana’s Right to Compute Act, a new law that requires government restrictions on computational resources to be “demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored” to address an actual problem.
The Goldwater Institute’s lawsuit against the city of Missoula is the first case of the new Big Sky Legal Project, a joint initiative with the Frontier Institute in Montana. Through this partnership and others, Goldwater will continue to defend free enterprise and property rights in Montana and around the nation.
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It’s pretty simple: legislatures pass laws and executive agencies enforce them. But the bird brains at the Arizona Department of Agriculture don’t seem to get it—a few years back they imposed an expensive new rule, without legislative authorization, mandating that all eggs sold in the state come from cage-free hens. The Goldwater Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation sued, and in a win for the separation of powers, an Arizona judge struck down this gross example of administrative state overreach.
When they adopted the “cage-free” egg rule, Agriculture Department bureaucrats insisted they were authorized to impose it under a law that gives the agency power to “adopt rules for poultry husbandry and the production of eggs.” That language is so broad, there would seemingly be no stopping the department from imposing almost any rule. But an Arizona law—which Goldwater helped write and pass—limits administrative power by making it clear that agencies can’t make rules “not specifically authorized by statute.” In a recent ruling, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge agreed that the department’s cage-free egg rule is not “specifically authorized” and must go.
The Goldwater Institute has long argued that the administrative state may be the largest threat to constitutional democracy in the country. This ruling provides a perfect example of how we can begin to rein in administrative state power.
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What’s the difference between a sign and a mural? The city of Salina, Kan., claims that signs “direct attention” to businesses and can be regulated. That was their reasoning for opposing a painting on the side of a local burger joint while allowing many other murals all around town. A three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit Court has now struck down Salina’s ordinance, agreeing with the Goldwater Institute that it violates free-speech rights.
The city of Salina is full of murals—it actually hosts an annual mural competition. But the city objected to a local restauranteur’s amusing mural of UFO-like hamburgers engaged in a space battle because it “directs attention” to his business. But other murals—a baseball mural on a baseball training facility, a “Symphony of Sunflowers” mural at orchestra hall—also direct attention to things. The restaurateur sued, represented by the Kansas Justice Institute, and Goldwater filed a friend of the court brief backing him. The Tenth Circuit panel agreed that the city’s ordinance was arbitrary and clearly unconstitutional.
There is nothing in the Constitution that says “commercial” speech is entitled to less protection than “non-commercial” speech. The Goldwater Institute will always defend the free speech of business owners—and every American.
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