The New Orleans City Council on Thursday (Oct. 10) unanimously approved a Super Bowl “clean zone,” which will temporarily regulate and restrict public and commercial activity across a swath of New Orleans for nine days surrounding Super Bowl LIX in February 2025.
The clean zone will include the Central Business District, French Quarter, Treme and Tulane-Gravier. It includes the Superdome, Smoothie King Center, and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
Today, clean zones have become de rigueur for major events. In New Orleans, clean zones have been used for the French Quarter Festival, Essence Festival and the NCAA Men’s Final Four, among other major events.
But clean zones have also regularly come under fire in the city: Last year, Essence Festival faced criticism for its decision to issue a cease-and-desist against the Black-owned bookstore Baldwin & Co and event promoter Lit Diaries for their attempt to host a block party featuring Black authors.
In 2019, an environmental protester was charged with violating the clean zone of the French Quarter Fest, but the city ultimately dropped the charges and agreed not to enforce the clean zone ordinance against the protester. And Super Bowl XLVII in 2013 had the boundaries of its clean zone limited by a judge after a First Amendment legal challenge.
As a result, the council has become more wary about authorizing clean zone permits. Earlier this year, it declined to issue one for the Sugar Bowl and created smaller, more limited clean zones for French Quarter Fest and Essence Festival.
“Businesses within the Clean Zone can continue their daily operations and maintain regular hours as usual,” a representative for the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation, which spearheads the city’s Super Bowl host committee, said in an email. “The Clean Zone ordinance does not prohibit any business from conducting normal business operations in the designated area.”
First Amendment lawyer Bruce Hamilton, who previously worked for the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana on a clean zone lawsuit in 2019, said that while this year’s clean zone has some improvements from previous ones, it is still “excessive.”
Hamilton pointed to the nine-day duration – lasting from Feb. 3 at 6 a.m. to Feb. 11 at 11:59 p.m. – and the large size of the clean zone as potentially problematic.
“To me, that’s way overbroad in terms of creating these restrictions,” Hamilton said. “And if you look at the size of the geographically, it extends far beyond the sort of immediate vicinity of the venue, which is the Superdome, right?”
The ordinance says that the clean zone will include “public participation areas” for non-commercial speech, including political protest, in order to “mitigate any impact on constitutionally protected activity.” But Hamilton said that, in his opinion, political speech should not be restricted to specific, cordoned-off areas.
“I just find that sort of personally offensive because the government is saying, ‘We don’t want to restrict your First Amendment rights to self-expression and speech, so we’re going to carve out these public participation areas where you’re allowed to express yourself,’” Hamilton said. “And that’s sort of antithetical to the traditions of the First Amendment.”
‘The devil’s really in the details’
Commercial speech — such promotional materials for businesses — can be a bit more complicated to litigate, Hamilton said.
“The devil’s really in the details when when you get into specific restrictions on commercial speech,” Hamilton said.
He pointed to clean zone restrictions on distribution or promotional giveaways as one aspect that concerned him.
Free speech concerns over commercial advertising have come up again and again in clean zones for the Super Bowl. According to ESPN, vendors have been compelled to paint over manufacturers’ logos on food truck tires — because the tires were not made by Bridgestone, an NFL sponsor — and business owners have been asked to remove ads from their own buildings. .
The NFL first started using clean zones in the early 2000s, in part because it faced ambush marketing by Budweiser, according to ESPN.
At a council committee meeting last week, representatives from the Greater New Orleans Sports Foundation cited the need to protect the Super Bowl from ambush marketing and conflicting signage as among the reasons for establishing a clean zone. They reiterated that to Verite News.
“These ordinances fulfill host city obligations committed during the bid process and do not prohibit any business from conducting normal business operations in the designated area,” said Jay Cicero, president and CEO of the New Orleans Super Bowl Host Committee, in an email. “This has been standard practice for all major sporting and entertainment events over the past 20-25 years. The last clean zone ordinance for a major sporting event in New Orleans was for the 2022 NCAA Men’s Final Four, and there were no issues.”
Notably, the Super Bowl clean zone did not face public pushback at either the committee meeting or Thursday’s City Council meeting when it was discussed. At a committee meeting, Councilmembers Freddie King and Eugene Green assured attendees that the purpose of the clean zone was to help the NFL operate the Super Bowl smoothly, not to restrict locals.
“At the end of the day, it’s to bring our city in a position to work with the Super Bowl,” Green said. “Sometimes the name ‘clean zone’ is the biggest challenge.”