|
Home >
Legislative Tracker
> Billboard Rollback Bill
Land Use:
Billboard Rollback Bill
Our Position: oppose
Bill Number: HB1097
Sponsor: Rep. Tom McCall
Legislative Session: 2006
Billboarders Square Off with Garden Club Ladies? Georgia’s Outdoor Advertising Industry is one of the more successful at visual pollution as any in the US. GA highways are festooned with as many ugly and flashing billboards as anyplace you may care to visit. There are stretches here that rival the photo displays often seen of Tokyo’s Ginza Distict, or New York’s fabled Times Square. Lately there has been a sort of “arms race” among the billboard companies to see who can erect the tallest signs along the Interstate Highways, and now some of I-75 is lined, as if with gigantic picket fencing, with towering advertisements for Neckid Wimmen Truckstops. HB 1097, by Rep. Tom McCall, is the latest attempt by the billboard industry to extract even more in the way of places to put signs and to lower their costs while raising their incomes.
Status
The Rules Committee put the bill before the House on Feb. 22. It emerged from the debate as a shell of itself: only the "nekkid ladies" prohibition, and the severability language indicating that provision's unconstitutionality, along with a ban on double-stacked boards, survived the vote. However, the Senate Transportation Committee, after being heavily lobbied by the Outdoor Advertising Industry, has restored much of the material that the House cut out of the HB 1097 on Feb. 22. This bill ought to be defeated. The industry is using Constitutionally dubious language in the bill to “clean up” billboards of questionable taste. This attempt to “uphold family values” is a cheap fig leaf under which the billboard industry is hiding its real aims: cutting all the trees along the roads so their ugly signs are more visible. They don’t care if the “dirty signs” come down or not, and their bill is written so that they still get free tree cutting even if the obscene sign provision gets struck down by the courts.
Action Needed
Concerned citizens should contact their Senators and let them know this bill needs a clean up and should be defeated.
Background
Twice the Garden Clubs of GA have taken the billboard industry and then GA DOT to the state Supreme Court over this matter, and twice they have prevailed, and twice the billboard industry has been bitter and tried to write a law that cuts the amount they have to pay for the tree cutting. This bill was another version of the same thing that has gone before, but it was stopped in the House, by convincing margins. Now they want another shot at free tree cutting, in exchange for the “significant value” of lowering their signs. The fact that the “significant value” goes to their pocketbooks is a fact that the industry wishes to avoid. Rep. McCall is a former recent Democrat who switched parties when control of the legislature changed hands. He is now Chair of the House Agriculture Committee and Chair of the Interstate Highway and Beautification Subcommittee of House Transportation. The bill starts off with a beguiling innocence, banning advertisements that appeal to “the prurient interest,” but wastes little more time in such Constitutionally dubious work before moving on into serious legislating: Double stacked signs, with two ads facing the same direction, are prohibited after July of this year. Next, multiple message signs are divided into two categories, “mechanical” and “nonmechanical,” the latter of which use light emitting diodes (LEDs), back lighting, or any other light source that does not emit a visible beam from the sign….” “Mechanical” signs are regulated as to the length of time each message must be displayed, the length of time allowed to change the message, and the distance each such sign must be located from the next (almost one mile.) Nonmechanical signs are subject to no such restrictions, and simply “shall be permitted.” This would appear to be a large stimulus to LED signage. Finally, the bill gets into its real purpose, gutting the restrictions on tree “trimming” that Georgia’s Garden Club Ladies have been able to force on the Outdoor Ugliness Industry by lawsuits and lobbying. The particular legislative techniques employed in this “claw back” are so arcane that they are not easily set forth. Because of references to statutory paragraphs that are not in the bill, a reader needs a copy of the existing law to determine exactly what is being proposed. The exact details of what is proposed may be incorrect in the following description, but the general outline is fairly plain. A new height limit of 70 feet from the level of the pavement on a highway to the top of an adjacent billboard is imposed on all new billboards. This would seem to be aimed at the regulatory purpose of ending the “reach for the skies” arms race the Billboarders have been waging among themselves. Then comes the tricky part: for each too-tall sign that the owners agree to lower, the fees and restrictions imposed by the Garden Club Ladies’ “beautification” statute are waived. And, for each lowered sign, an additional new sign is automatically permitted, also free of fees and restrictions. This is because sign lowering is declared to be a “substantial benefit.” The phrase, “substantial benefit,” is the exact wording of the test the courts have set for determining if there is a Constitutionally prohibited “gratuity” or not, when state actions result in private party receiving something of value from the state. The idea that the Garden Club Ladies are either going to be deceived by this piece of trick legal writing, or that they are will to trade away their hard-won gains in return for the dubious advantage of looking at signs that are not as high as they are now, is silly, and entirely misplaced. HB 1097 is in for some hard lobbying in this election year, when nobody is interested in seeing any angry Garden Club Ladies.
|
