INC NEWS - flashing, changing, bright, electronic, new, improved, special treatment billboards

[Tom Miller]

I for one am against what the billboard people are asking for, i.e., special
treatment for a non-conforming use.  As a community, we decided that Durham
would be a billboard-free zone and we adopted zoning regulations to prevent
new ones from going up.  Those rules also required the old ones to come down
at the end of their useful life (amortization).  The billboard industry
fought like tigers against Durham in court, but Durham won.  As a result, a
lot of billboards came down over time.  Then the billboard industry got a
bill passed to stop amortization as a way of getting rid of unwanted uses
and the remaining billboards got to stay as nonconforming uses.  Under the
law, the owner of a nonconforming use can keep it and can even keep it
repaired.  He loses it if it's destroyed or if he lets it go for a period of
time.  The one thing he can't do is increase it, improve it, or make it
bigger or better.  So if my garage was legal when it was built, but is now
too close to my neighbor's property line under the UDO, I can keep it.  I
can paint it.  I can put a new roof on it.  But I can't add on to it.  I
can't replace it with a new one.  Why is the billboard industry so special
that they get a bye on the rules we ordinary citizens have to follow and
which we ordinary citizens count on to protect us?

 

These are the same people, the exact same people, who did everything they
could to make downzoning illegal in NC.  They fought us for years in the
legislature.  By us I mean INC.  Once upon a time INC kept a mailing list of
hundreds of neighborhood organizations across the state.  We hosted a couple
of meetings with neighborhood groups from other cities, like Raleigh,
Henderson, Chapel Hill, and Winston-Salem.  Throughout the 80s and 90s when
the inevitable billboard bill would be introduced in each session of the
General Assembly, we would work with the League of Municipalities and
environmental groups to stop or blunt the billboard industry's hateful
legislation.  INC mailed out hundreds of letters informing and enlisting
neighborhoods all over the state to help in the fight.  We were pretty
successful too.

 

These are the same people who used litigation as a stalling tactic every
time our zoning rules required them to take down a billboard.  It cost the
city thousands of dollars in legal resources, but I'll hand it to the city
attorney's office, they didn't give up and they didn't lose.  That's when
the billboard people, one of which was the predecessor of the very firm
making Tuesday night's presentation, attacked the amortization tool in the
legislature.  We, again I mean INC, fought against them.  Eventually,
however, they got their way.

 

Now they're still not satisfied.  They have a new product which even they
say is the advertising we can't "choose to see", but "have to see" and they
want special treatment in our zoning ordinance to put it up and make us look
at it.  Well in Durham, we have a choice.

 

I am against it.  I would even be against it if what they wanted was to put
up one new improved and flashing billboard up in someone else's neighborhood
and pay me $500,000 to sit by while they did it.

 

No one should get to replace a nonconforming use with another nonconformity.
When Durham decided to be a billboard-free zone, INC was part of that
decision.  Flashing or just flashy versions of the thing we worked so hard
to get rid of won't convince me to go along with any proposal that replaces
old billboards with new ones or which treats the billboard industry as a
special case.

 

Tom Miller

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