Outfront Media Group LLC v. City of Miami Beach · No. 3D2025-1165 (Fla. 3d DCA) · Decided October 14, 2026
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The Third District Court of Appeal has affirmed the dismissal, for lack of standing, of an advertising company’s declaratory judgment suit challenging a competitor’s contract with the City of Miami Beach. The court rejected the company’s argument for a broad “competitor standing” under the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Skaggs-Albertson’s v. ABC Liquors, Inc., reading that decision narrowly. A concurring judge wrote separately on the constitutional basis of standing.
What Happened
Outfront Media Group LLC and IKE Smart City, LLC are competitors that both have contracts with the City of Miami Beach to place advertising displays in the City’s rights-of-way. Outfront’s displays are on bus shelters; IKE’s are on freestanding advertising kiosks. Outfront’s 20-year bus shelter contract with the City gave it a limited exclusivity: the City would not permit an “Advertising Freestanding Kiosk” within 250 feet of any bus shelter. IKE’s July 28, 2023 contract authorized up to thirty advertising kiosks at its own expense, and expressly made IKE’s rights subject to Outfront’s exclusivity zones.
On November 4, 2024, Outfront sued the City and IKE in Miami-Dade circuit court. It sought a declaratory judgment that “[d]igital advertising kiosks cannot be installed in the public right-of-way as a matter of state, county, and local law,” citing sections 334.035, 337.407, 337.408, and 479.11 of the Florida Statutes, section 33-84 of the Miami-Dade Code, and sections 82-411 and 82-412 of the Miami Beach Code. It also sought an injunction against performance of the IKE contract. The court noted that “Outfront did not claim that IKE’s contract with the City violated any of Outfront’s rights conveyed by its contract with the City or by state or federal law.” The trial court dismissed for lack of standing.
What the Court Held
In an opinion by Judge Logue, the Third District affirmed. It began with the nature of standing in Florida. Unlike federal standing, which arises from the case-or-controversy language of Article III, the court wrote, Florida’s doctrine “ultimately sounds in the express separation of powers provision of Article II, Section 3 of the Florida Constitution,” quoting Solares v. City of Miami, 166 So. 3d 887, 889 (Fla. 3d DCA 2015). It noted that Florida departs from the federal model in some respects, including that standing is waivable in Florida, citing Page v. Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas, 308 So. 3d 953, 960-61 (Fla. 2020), and observed that Justice Sasso has called for the Florida Supreme Court to reconsider its standing precedents. “So,” the court wrote, “Florida’s law of standing may be in flux.”
The court then turned to the declaratory judgment act, section 86.021, Florida Statutes. Although the act is “substantive and remedial” and is to be liberally construed, the court wrote, a declaratory judgment remains a judicial remedy that requires a justiciable controversy between adverse parties. To have standing, a plaintiff must have “his or her rights” at stake or be a person “whose rights, status, or other equitable or legal relations are affected.” Courts routinely dismiss declaratory actions where the plaintiff has no right at stake and seeks what amounts to an advisory opinion.
Applying those principles, the court noted three things. Outfront conceded it had no special injury, different in kind and degree from that suffered by the public at large, of the kind recognized in cases like Herbits v. City of Miami, 207 So. 3d 274 (Fla. 3d DCA 2016). Outfront did not claim the IKE contract violated its own contractual rights; for example, it did not claim the contract allowed kiosks in areas reserved exclusively to Outfront. And “the laws and ordinances that Outfront maintains were violated by IKE’s contract are not designed to protect Outfront from competition and do not authorize private rights of action.”
Instead, Outfront asked the court to recognize “competitor standing,” which it described as allowing regulated competitors standing to challenge government conduct that confers an unlawful competitive advantage on a similarly situated actor, and it relied on Skaggs-Albertson’s v. ABC Liquors, Inc., 363 So. 2d 1082, 1090-91 (Fla. 1978). The Third District said ABC Liquors “cannot be properly read to support such a broad proposition,” noting that the Fourth District recently cited it for the opposite point: “[L]oss of business from a potential competitor ordinarily cannot provide the existing proprietor with the requisite standing.” Everett Bros. Recycling, Inc. v. Martin County, 401 So. 3d 372, 378 (Fla. 4th DCA 2025). In ABC Liquors, the Third District explained, the Supreme Court found standing for a liquor store challenging a competitor’s location in violation of distance requirements not because of competition itself, but because a liquor store faces the risk of losing a license it may be unable to replace, which the Supreme Court treated as “a special kind of injury.” The Third District read the case “as narrowly recognizing special injury standing for liquor stores that challenge the decision to allow a competitor in a location that violates regulations prohibiting the operation of such businesses within certain distances of each other.” Because Outfront did not qualify for that injury and claimed no other, the dismissal was proper. Judge Lindsey concurred.
The Concurrence
Judge Gooden specially concurred. Judge Gooden wrote that standing “is not new” and that Florida courts have discussed it since at least the 1850s. In Judge Gooden’s view, Florida’s standing doctrine “is grounded in the constitutional limitations of governmental power,” and standing derives “not from a single constitutional provision, but from several provisions working together—and from the structure of the Constitution itself.”
Judge Gooden pointed to the Declaration of Rights and the open-courts provision, Article I, section 21, which provides that “[t]he courts shall be open to every person for redress of any injury.” The word “injury,” Judge Gooden wrote, is not unlimited; it “implies ‘the doing of some act which constitutes an invasion of a legal right,’” and traditionally meant “an invasion of a legally protected private interest.” Judge Gooden added that judicial power, vested by Article V, section 1, is “not a roving, general authority to resolve every question or dispute presented by anyone who asks,” and that judicial power is further restrained by the separation of powers. Standing, Judge Gooden concluded, “marks the boundary between the judicial power that the Constitution entrusts to the courts and matters that lie outside that power,” and “serves as a limitation on the judicial power itself.”
Why It Matters
The decision reads the ABC Liquors special-injury rule narrowly and holds that a competitor that shows no special injury, no violation of its own contractual rights, and no private right under the cited laws lacks standing to seek a declaration that a government contract with another company violates right-of-way laws. The majority describes Florida’s law of standing as possibly “in flux,” and the concurrence offers a broader constitutional account of standing than the majority’s separation-of-powers basis. The opinion is not final until disposition of any timely motion for rehearing.
The Opinion
Download the full opinion (PDF)
| Court | Third District Court of Appeal |
| Case No. | 3D2025-1165 |
| Lower Court | Circuit Court, Miami-Dade County (Judge Beatrice Butchko Sanchez) |
| Opinion by | Judge Logue (Judge Lindsey concurring; Judge Gooden specially concurring) |
| Decided | October 14, 2026 |
| Result | Affirmed |