Feisty Tacoma and compliant King County face off with a billboard powerhouse
The county prepares to welcome fast-shuffling, TV-style digital billboards. But Tacoma tells Clear Channel to take a hike and turn out the lights.
Maybe it’s the water that makes people in Tacoma so feisty. Whatever it is, the King County Council ain’t drinking it. Tacoma’s schoolteachers persisted for 10 days in a strike that, wise or not, was anything but timid. And its city council last month delivered a defiant rebuke to Clear Channel, the national billboard powerhouse that has cowed, sued, and sweet-talked so many other municipalities into submission. It banned the digital billboards it earlier agreed to and beat the famously litigious Clear Channel to the courthouse to launch the inevitable court fight.
Meanwhile, the bold new electronic future is coming to this county’s roadsides. On Sept. 13, a County Council committee that three months ago had deferred a measure to allow the image-shuffling, television-like electronic signs quietly considered an amended version. Councilmembers Larry Phillips, Jane Hague, Pete von Reichbauer, Bob Ferguson, and Joe McDermott voted unanimously to approve it, clearing the way for full council approval this coming Monday.
Tacoma and King County are two beachheads in a nationwide campaign by Clear Channel and other "out-of-home advertising" companies to legalize the digital boards, which had been banned under federal highway rules and many state and municipal codes along with other flashing, animated, and intermittent displays. The industry has promoted them as “static” displays, which is true if you only watch them for six seconds. (The images themselves aren’t animated, but they shuffle eight times a minute, with a one- or two-second blink in between; the companies sell them as outdoor TV commercials for a captive audience, touting the thousands of message placements they allow an advertiser.) Clear Channel has pitched them as emergency messaging systems that can flash AMBER alerts, Crime Stoppers bulletins, and other public service announcements as well as ads, often enlisting endorsements from police agencies.
The feds rolled over in 2007: The Federal Highway Administration, reversing decades of policy, ruled that digital billboards are kosher as long they don’t use their animation capabilities and display “stationery images for a reasonably fixed period of time.” The fight has since moved to the states and cities—especially, it seems of late, in the Northwest. Oregon legislators approved digital billboards in June, calling them a signal that the state was “open for business.” A bill euphemistically titled “Authorizing the Use of Digital Outdoor Advertising Signs to Expand the State's Emergency Messaging Capabilities” passed the Washington Senate last session but stalled in the House. Now Tacoma and King County are the local front lines.
The county ordinance will allow billboard owners (in effect Clear Channel, which dominates the business here and in Tacoma) to swap out existing conventional, single-image billboards one-for-one for digitals. The deal that Tacoma has rebuffed was rather more favorable: The company would give up as many as 15 conventional billboards for each digital board it got to erect.
The Tacoma deal didn’t emerge from the goodness of the billboard barons’ and baronesses’ hearts, or even from the fact that the shuffling digital displays are much more lucrative than traditional billboards. It was hammered out as a settlement of a lawsuit that Clear Channel filed three years ago to stop the city of Tacoma from doing something it had already given 10 years’ warning it was going to do: to make owners remove illegal billboards that stand too close to residences, churches, schools, shorelines, or other billboards. The stakes are high: The city estimates that some 193 of the 253 billboard “faces” (some sign structures have multiple faces) within its borders violate a sign law it adopted in 1997. Many other jurisdictions, including King County, have grandfathered in nonconforming billboards like these while barring new ones. Seattle adopted a complicated formula by which Clear Channel could exchange old, noncompliant signs for new, permissible ones.
Tacoma, whose cityscape is particularly billboard-bejeweled, opted instead to order the nonconforming signs removed but gave their owners 10 years — until 2007 — to recoup their investments first. And, like Seattle, it granted them exemptions from a general moratorium on new billboards; they could “relocate” nonconforming signs to legal locations, in effect swapping one illegal billboard for one permitted one, a sort of cap-and-trade for visual pollution. This had one predictable result: Maintenance lagged on the doomed boards, and neighbors complained about rusting, peeling hulks — blighted blight.
Then, as the 2007 deadline neared, Clear Channel changed course and, reverting to its familiar litigation strategy, charged the city with violating its free-speech rights by ordering billboards removed. Last summer it and the city struck a settlement agreement: Tacoma would allow one digital billboard in exchange for every five nonconforming conventional boards and 10 relocation permits Clear Channel relinquished. If it made the company remove any boards or give up any permits without letting it put up digital boards, the city would pay their “fair market value.” Elsewhere, according to one prominent industry critic, Scenic America president Mary Tracy, Clear Channel has demanded $5 million compensation for a single billboard.
Tacoma officials signed the agreement in July 2010. Clear Channel didn’t; perhaps it hoped to get better terms by waiting. (Clear Channels’s real estate director, Michael Mayes, said in email he could not comment on this or other matters related to Tacoma “because of the pending litigation.”) But time was not on its side. Tacomans rose like an Arab Spring to protest the Clear Channel settlement, billboard blight generally, and digital boards especially. Last spring 254 weighed in on the scheme, 95 percent of them against it. Some brought billboard-style placards to hearings, flipped them, and asked the solons on the dais if they now understood how shuffling images distracted drivers.
In May the Tacoma Planning Commission urged scrapping the settlement and banning digitals. The mayor and city council, which had unanimously supported the settlement, signaled they would do just that. In July, after waiting a year, Clear Channel exercised its self-declared “option” and signed the agreement. Too late, said the city council; it voted to invalidate the settlement and ban the digi-billboards. And it beat Clear Channel to the courthouse, preemptively asking a judge to declare the agreement null and void. Clear Channel will likely argue that a deal’s a deal, no matter who signed it when. City officials will contend that the agreement couldn’t become effective until the council passed an ordinance implementing it, which it wouldn’t do.
Anti-billboard activists around the country have hailed Tacoma’s move. “It’s a great victory,” says Scenic America’s Tracy. And, she adds, an unusual one; other local governments have banned the digi-boards, but not after they initially agreed to allow them.
By contrast, Tracy says she’s “shocked” that King County would approve them. But county officials haven’t received anything like the public outcry in Tacoma. A single Seattle-based environmental designer, Paula Rees, has been a solitary but persistent voice in the wilderness, decrying the effects of billboards digital and otherwise. That may be because the stakes don’t sound so high: Only 19 existing King County billboards would be eligible for conversion. But this is, in fact, comparable to the number Clear Channel could have installed in Tacoma. Just one can alter a cityscape, especially if you live near it. And King County may be a steppingstone to a much bigger prize, Seattle, with hundreds of still-predigital billboards.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Sep 23, 9:29 a.m. Inappropriate
Congratulations to Tacoma! And boo, hiss, to the King County Council.
Posted Fri, Sep 23, 9:48 a.m. Inappropriate
So if we're not getting any money out of this, why is King County bending over for this visual pollution? I don't want billboards--whether static or digital flashers--anyway, so money wouldn't sell me on this idea. What are the council members who voted unanimously for this providing as a rationale? Is it even possible to elect officeholders who put public benefit and aesthetics first? I am sick of my elected officials selling us out.
Posted Fri, Sep 23, 10:49 a.m. Inappropriate
Time to bring out the paint guns. Or slingshots with paint balloons. Just consider it the masses imposing a pollution tax.
Posted Fri, Sep 23, 2:34 p.m. Inappropriate
I am just amazed that Clear Channel's favorite litigation strategy is to charge a city with violating the company's free-speech rights whenever they are asked to remove their billboards. It makes me wonder how far I would get if I tried to sue local newspapers, radio and TV stations for violating my free-speech rights if they refused to let me run advertising for free or at an incredibly discounted rate. It's a pretty ridiculous idea. If they want to use our shared landscape to sell products to me, they should at least pay our cash-strapped cities and towns a fair share of the massive amounts of money they make doing it.
I don't enjoy having all of these electronic (or static) billboards flogging products to me everywhere I look, but if I am forced to live with them, I'd at least like to know that we're all getting some kind of public benefit in exchange for sacrificing our scenic beauty.
Posted Fri, Sep 23, 5:28 p.m. Inappropriate
Thank you for the work you put into this article. It's time we ended the free lunch for the billboard bullies. To bad they get to expense their legal fees while suing communities across the country. I heard this from John Stewart last night and thought it particulary appropriate, "corporations may be considered like people, but they're not Americans"
Posted Sat, Sep 24, 9:44 p.m. Inappropriate
"What are the council members who voted unanimously for this providing as a rationale?"
July 13, 2011
Thank you for contacting me regarding a proposal to allow—under specific guidelines and regulations—digital billboards in unincorporated King County....
Proposed Ordinance 2011-0140, legislation which I have co-sponsored, would amend the King County Code to allow and regulate the use of digital technology on billboard faces.
As currently written [July version], the legislation would require that:
Billboards convey only a static advertising message. No flashing or blinking lights, variation in light intensity, animation or movement are allowed;
Each message must be displayed for a minimum of eight seconds, and each message change must be completed within two seconds;
A light sensing device will adjust the billboard's brightness as ambient light conditions change, and brightness levels will not exceed 3/10 of a foot candles above ambient light.
The legislation would not:
Increase the overall number of billboards in unincorporated King County;
Increase the size of the advertising face of billboards;
Increase the total number of billboard faces;
Change provisions related to locations or relocations of billboards;
Change required distance from arterial streets, distance between billboards, or number of billboards per mile.
I have heard from advocates on both sides of the issue. Local cities which are considering annexing unincorporated portions of King County have contacted the Council with their concerns. I have also heard postive testimony from law enforcement agencies about the public safety benefits of these billboards due to the fact that they can be updated remotely and instantaneously. I understand that around the United States, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the US Marshals Service, and local sheriff and police departments utilize these billboards to do real-time outreach to the public about emerging public safety incidents, including Crime Stoppers and AMBER Alerts for abducted children. It is also possible to use the billboards to broadcast of timely public safety information in the event of a natural disaster.
This legislation has been re-referred to the Council's Transportation, Economy and Environment Committee, which I chair. I anticipate taking up this issue for consideration later this year, and will provide an update when further committee discussion of this issue has been scheduled. [NO such update has yet been provided to those who received this email in July!]
Thanks...
Sincerely,
Larry Phillips, Councilmember"
Posted Mon, Sep 26, 8:41 a.m. Inappropriate
obvious that King County Council is on the TAKE. Not so in enlightened City of Destiny. HEY CLEAR CHANNEL, CLEAN UP YOUR CRAP! http://i.feedtacoma.com/KevinFreitas/hey-clear-channel-clean-up-012/
Posted Mon, Sep 26, 8:54 p.m. Inappropriate
Good story, but one geographical nit pick: Fife is east of Tacoma, not north -- I-5 heads west to east from the Tacoma Dome to Milton as it crosses what used to be the Puyallup River estuary.
Posted Tue, Sep 27, 9:37 a.m. Inappropriate
Last I knew, we in King County still lived in a democracy.
The most important element of a democracy is due process for all people. What is shocking here is the lack of transparency and the fact that the King County Council REFUSES to allow a fair public hearing on this very important issue.
Watch this video and see if the King County Council is playing fair by allowing a public hearing on this ordinance........
http://www.blightfighters.org/?tag=blight-fighters
What should the ending be? - we will have to live with this decision for generations
Posted Tue, Sep 27, 10:50 a.m. Inappropriate
King County Council members can list all the talking points which they feel speak in favor of digital billboards. This is because they have only listened to the rhetoric of Clear Channel. Missing are the facts known by so many people and their communities - nationwide - who have been hassled, threatened and dumped on by outdoor advertisers. We need - and deserve - serious environmental review regarding noise (indeed, the signs are very loud), light impacts (loss of night skies, bird migration,invasive - BY DESIGN),safety for pedestrians and drivers, etc. Why does the public have to hound dog issues in order to get the job done RIGHT?
Posted Tue, Sep 27, 1:43 p.m. Inappropriate
That animated billboard that's down on I-5 just North of Tacoma is HUGE distraction and a visual blight on the land.
King County members should be ashamed of letting any more of these be built in our county.
"I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all."
Ogden Nash
Posted Tue, Sep 27, 4:12 p.m. Inappropriate
Even advertising mogul David Oglivy called it:
"I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bikes, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"
Posted Wed, Sep 28, 3:05 p.m. Inappropriate
The Oglivy quote is great. Here's another superb one from William F. Buckley, Jr.
"Billboards are acts of aggression, against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected. If a homeowner desires to construct a huge Coca-Cola sign facing his own homestead rather than the public highway, in order to remind him, every time he looks out his window, that the time has come to pause and be refreshed, he certainly should be left free to do so. But if he wants to face the sign toward us, that is something else, and the big name libertarian theorists should go to work demolishing the billboarders' abuse of the argument of private property.”
From an article in The Jeweler's Eye entitled The Politics of Beauty by conservative author and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.
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