A New Hampshire bakery has won a key victory in its fight to keep a mural of donuts and other baked goods above its storefront. Although town officials had tried to force the bakery to remove the mural, citing zoning regulations, a federal court ruled Monday that the city could not enforce the bakery’s sign regulations.
In 2022, Sean Young, owner of Leavitt’s Country Bakery, a popular bakery in Conway, New Hampshire, worked with a local high school art class to paint a mural for the bakery’s storefront.
The students’ mural depicts baked goods forming the shape of a mountain range with a colorful sunrise in the background. At first, the mural did not cause any controversy and was even covered positively by local media.
However, about a week after the mural went online, Conway City Code Enforcement Officer Jeremy Gibbs told Young that the mural violated the town’s zoning regulations.
According to the town, the mural violates local laws governing signage. Because the mural depicts baked goods — which the bakery obviously sells — it is considered a “signage,” not a mural, which is subject to rules limiting its size.
Although the town’s rules define signage extremely broadly, in practice the town enforces its signage regulations only on speech it deems commercial in nature. For example, if Levitt Country Bakery had only erected a sunrise mural, the town wouldn’t have a problem even if the written rules applied to both.
“Imposing different restrictions on speech based on who is speaking and what is being said is a restriction on free speech based on content and who is speaking,” the Institute for Justice, a public interest law group that sued Conway on behalf of the bakery, wrote in a 2023 complaint.
On Monday, a judge agreed. While the judge noted that the town’s sign rules, as written, are not necessarily unconstitutional, the town’s selectivity in enforcing them is.
“The court has ruled only that the Town of Conway’s application of its sign code, and specifically its enforcement of the Levitt sign in this case in a particular manner, does not withstand any degree of constitutional scrutiny,” District Judge Joseph N. Laplante wrote in a ruling that bars the town from forcing the Town of Young to remove the mural.
“While the mural may have violated the sign code because of its size, Gibbs’s ruling is based on a reason that has no textual basis in the sign code, which does not discriminate between murals based on content.”
The ruling is a major victory for bakeries that paint murals on their own land — without government intervention. “Towns can certainly regulate signage.
They can regulate the size of signs or the number of signs allowed, but they cannot pick and choose which signs to regulate based on what is depicted on them,” said Betsy Sands, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, in a press release Monday.
“Today’s ruling makes clear that Conway’s actions discriminate against certain signs based on what officials believe is depicted on the signs. This is a clear violation of the First Amendment.”
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