A First Lady known for her interests in environmental causes and scenic beauty, Lady Bird Johnson championed the beautification effort and adopted the cause as her own. As she stated, “Ugliness is so grim. A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which will lessen tensions.”
In effect, the HBA:
States that were subject to an earlier outdoor advertising control law called the Bonus Act (Public Law 85-381, April 16, 1958) were required to continue to control signs under both programs. Compensation was required for signs removed because of the HBA.
In order to avoid a ten percent reduction in federal highway funds, states were required to provide for “effective control” of billboards by enacting adequate billboard control laws along federal-aid highways.
To comply with this mandate, states had to negotiate federal-state agreements (FSAs) that defined acceptable standards for billboard size, spacing, and lighting. This requirement limited the construction of new billboards and provided for the removal of pre-existing signs that violated the state’s FSA standards.
By mid-1970, only 32 states had enacted compliance laws with HBA, and only 18 were found to be in full compliance. To encourage more compliance, Congress provided substantial federal funds for billboard removal programs, and the Federal Highway Administrator put increasing pressure on recalcitrant states to adopt compliance laws. By 1972, only one state, South Dakota, was not found in compliance. South Dakota filed an unsuccessful suit against the Secretary of Transportation for withholding the funding.
Advocates of scenic conservation argue that the Highway Beautification Act falls short of the mark in establishing a legal framework for enforcing and policing the outdoor advertising industry.
Key issues and concerns include:
However, the guidelines as to what constitutes commercial/industrial activity are extremely flexible and subject to interpretation. In many states, the sign law regulations would allow a single general store to erect six 1,200 square-foot billboards, a total of 7,200 square feet of advertising space. In many states, critics report that sign companies have used shell subsidiary businesses to secure the necessary state permits.
Amortization is a commonly used method of billboard removal. Amortization allows the billboard operator a locally determined grace period, generally from five to eight years, to remove their sign, during which the operator is able to recoup their business investment. Despite amortization’s effectiveness as a tool and repeated court rulings upholding the tool’s legality, the billboard lobby convinced Congress in 1978 to prohibit amortization along interstate and federal-aid primary highways. Thus, nonconforming billboards are protected from removal under the HBA unless state and local governments pay just compensation, as defined by state law.
The maximum allowable numbers of billboards under the Highway Beautification Act are significant: 21 structures per mile on Interstate highways, 36 structures per mile on rural primary highways, 106 per mile on urban primary highways. If maximum saturation were to occur, there would be more than 10 million billboards nationwide.
With regrettable deference, the federal government has allowed states to interpret the HBA to allow both state maintenance forces and billboard operators to access the public right of way and clear-cut publicly owned trees to improve the visibility to adjacent billboards.
HBA rules, established via agreements between the states and the federal government, allow billboard development in rural, unzoned areas.
Despite the fact that the states and the federal government have paid millions of dollars to remove nonconforming billboards, billboard operators pay no road user taxes or tolls, and only minimal fees to operate along the natio The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is not enforcing the congressionally mandated customary uses of lighting, size, and spacing of billboards. This has exacerbated the problem of static billboards and has also allowed rampant growth of digital billboards.
In 1965, the outdoor advertising industry agreed to a compromise to limit the size, spacing, and lighting of billboards to what was “customary” use at the time of passage. The “freezing” of billboard size, spacing, and lighting was supposed to ensure that these characteristics could not become more visually intrusive than they were in 1965. Upon passage of the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) in 1965, Congress directed public hearings in all 50 states to determine customary size, spacing, and lighting in each state at that time, and these findings were codified in the federal-state agreements (FSAs) that every state drafted to ensure compliance with the goals of the HBA. Any violations of an FSA could lead to penalties in the form of withholding up to 10% of federal highway funds.
Instead of enforcing these standards, FHWA officials allow states and cities to ignore customary use limitations, particularly those on size and lighting. The result has been to devalue public highways, compromise public safety, and permit more egregious billboards, thus completely undermining the HBA. This failure to enforce has resulted in the erection and operation of more than 9,600 digital billboards along our public highways throughout the country.
Draft language in the HBA stated that billboards would be banned “except in those areas of commercial and industrial use.” Due to a last-minute change, this language was amended to allow several billboards to be erected in nonurban, noncommercial areas where only one business exists. Over the last 50 years, this provision has allowed inappropriate advertising in otherwise scenic and rural areas of the country. Despite the original intent of the HBA, the law allows harmful billboard proliferation through inadequate zoning provisions. First, municipalities have considerable prerogative in extending commercial and industrial zones for outdoor advertising purposes. Second, the provisions on unzoned areas were meant to include places that might otherwise have been reasonably considered commercial or industrial areas based on the prevailing use of the properties there. This ambiguous section of the HBA constitutes an enormous loophole for sign companies.
The problems created by these poor guidelines extend to scenic byways programs by facilitating route segmentation. Unclear policies that potentially expand commercial and industrial areas near byway routes can allow more billboards into corridors that are otherwise protected. All scenic assets within a scenic corridor are protected by the scenic byway designation, and any areas removed from that designation become vulnerable. This can have significant immediate impacts as projects along a segmented portion lose their eligibility for National Scenic Byways Program funds. If a route becomes highly segmented, it can violate the byway corridor management plan and cause the whole byway to lose its designation status.
