One element drivers may or may not notice about their time riding on Interstate 40 in Wake, Durham and Orange counties is that there are no billboards, only standard informational signs about food, lodging and gasoline services available nearby at each exit, with up to six businesses allowed to put their logos on each sign with a blue background and an indication about how many miles the businesses are from the exit. This is intentional – when I-40 was finished from its split from Interstate 85 in Orange County until it ended in Wilmington some 260 miles later, the state authorized that no billboards be allowed to appear on the new road. Those restrictions later were dropped, yet the Triangle counties have continued to enforce a ban on billboards, because local leaders generally believe they add clutter and spoil scenic views in the area.
Of course, this does not mean that the Triangle is barren of billboards. The older I-85 has plenty in Orange and Durham counties, although nowhere near as what you might find in neighboring Alamance County. Anyone on Capital Boulevard in Raleigh sees them coming and going each day as well. But according to this excellent recent article in Business Leader Magazine, over nearly the last 25 years local government regulations have not permitted billboards to be replaced when damaged by natural occurrences, such as tornadoes, hurricanes or even real estate development, or be relocated when road projects threaten their location or when billboard visibility cannot be controlled due to surrounding vegetation.
These conditions have made it very unfavorable if not impossible for industry leaders such as Fairway Outdoor Advertising to construct new billboards in the Triangle as new roads appear, such as Interstate 540. They are trying to persuade local governments to adopt a cap-and-replace ordinance to keep the number of billboards the same yet allow area billboard companies to replace damaged billboards or those threatened by area development and relocate them to more appropriate areas. In return, billboard companies would offer vegetation management to control growth around their billboards to allow for visibility.
Currently, this offer remains in limbo, and the industry has at least one very vocal opponent, The News & Observer, as seen in this recent editorial. The newspaper complains about a recent move in a state Senate committee to allow an increase in cutting shrubs and trees around billboards from 250 to 375 feet and mentions fines that exist against illegal tree cutting around billboards that has occurred over the last year.
Mind you, the Triangle is not all anti-outdoors advertising. There are many signs along roads advertising sales and special events everywhere – they are just not as big as billboards, and most tend to be temporary, including those promoting political candidates, which have strict limits on when and where they can be placed on public roads.
While prospects for billboards appear bleak in the Triangle for now, it appears unlikely that North Carolina will do anything anytime soon as drastic as have Maine, Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii and ban billboards. Indeed, the state must make a pretty good chunk of change alone for taxes on the innumerable billboards advertising South of the Border on Interstate 95. But it is true that what often is established by the bigger local governments in the state filter down and eventually become state standards as well, and with the emphasis on visual and environmental concerns tending to be against billboards in the Triangle right now, they may have a tougher future in North Carolina than in the past. We shall see.
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Posted by: Micelewslesia | January 09, 2009 at 02:43 PM