IN DEPTH: Billboard fans and foes line up for battle
A plan to bring digital billboards to Durham, North Carolina is dividing the city, with law-enforcement and business groups lining up in favour while community activists and many politicians are not convinced by the outdoor media owner’s public-relations push.
The battle for Durham, where city authorities spent a decade and more than $1.5m on legal struggles to uphold their current sign regulations in the 1980s and 1990s, looks set to be one of the hardest-fought in the continuing confrontation between outdoor media firms and communities across the U.S. over the digitisation of billboard sites.
Fairway Outdoor Advertising, based in Augusta, Georgia, wants to replace some existing billboards with digital and move others to better locations on the roads where they already stand, although it is not proposing that the total permitted in the city should be increased. The revised regulations for which it is campaigning would also require beautification of the ground areas around billboards.
It is promising that digital faces will make up no more than a quarter of the total number of billboards in the city, and that they can be used indefinitely for public-safety messages such as Amber and Silver Alerts – highlighting missing children and elderly people – as well as for one free eight-second advertising spot donated to the community every minute.
Fairway is supported by the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce, which sees benefits in outdoor advertising for its members – 225 businesses in the area used billboards in 2009, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA). And it has also received endorsement from the North Carolina Sheriff Police Alliance as well as the county sheriff, Worth Hill, who was reported as saying: “These billboards will give me another tool to help me carry out my mission for this community.”
But the city police chief has taken a neutral stance, and local government outside of law enforcement also seems unconvinced. The Durham Planning Commission recommended in April that Fairway’s proposed revisions to the rules should not be accepted, although several members of the Commission would apparently have okayed it with modifications, and the deputy city attorney has warned that allowing Fairway’s request could lead to a slew of further applications to amend sign restrictions – this after Durham’s expensive and protracted fight to preserve the current regulations.
And, as so often in the digital-billboard debate that has played out in community after community across the U.S., there is some vociferous opposition from the public.
Reliable numbers on views held by the silent majority of the 220,000-strong community are hard to come by: an opinion poll conducted by NanoPhrades in August last year is cited by opponents as showing that 72 percent of residents supported the existing sign ordinance and only eight percent opposed it, yet Fairway quotes another survey carried out by OnPoint Polling and Research in 2007, which showed 57 percent in favour of digital with 34 percent against.
But there is no doubting the position of the contributor to a local online forum who wrote “PLEEEEEEEEZE NO MORE ADVERTISING!!!!!!!”, or that of Old West Durham Neighborhood Association president John Schelp, who observed that public-safety announcements can already be made on highway signs operated by the state Department of Transportation: “You don’t have to wait through advertisements for cigar outlets and beer before you get to an Amber Alert.”
Both sides even have Websites dedicated to the debate, with Fairway’s DurhamBillboardFacts.com being promoted on its existing non-digital billboards in the city, and Schelp apparently one of the activists behind SupportDurhamBillboardBan.com.
The usual suspicions
Whether these will have much impact on the public hearings scheduled to be held by the city and county governments in August remains to be seen. Most likely, the debate will follow a familiar pattern, with opponents suggesting that the billboards pose road-safety risks, increase light pollution, eat electricity and add to visual blight, while Fairway responds that the traffic dangers are at best unproven, light levels can be modified, digital billboards use few public resources, and the unipole structures may actually look smarter than their non-digital predecessors.
Underlying all that will be two considerations rarely spoken of overtly in formal debate on these issues, but assuredly potent ones in the minds of some opponents: the fact that Fairway is not a local company, and the perception, perhaps heightened in the Obama-led post-banking-crisis world, that there is too much commercialism already in the heart of American communities.
No contrast could be stronger than that between Durham and Huntsville, Alabama, where a local nonprofit dedicated to revitalising the downtown area has persuaded authorities to abandon plans for a $40,000 message board outside city hall – and instead put that money toward a much larger digital billboard on a major thoroughfare used by 110,000 vehicles every day.
Big Spring Partners hopes to raise $0.5m for the digital billboard from organisations such as educational institutions, and give them display time on it proportional to their donation. Supplied by local firm Trav-Ad Signs, it could be used to announce anything from concerts to meetings to high-school graduations, Big Spring believes.
Huntsville is tolerant of digital billboards: it last year allowed Beam Enterprises, an Alabama advertising firm, to install two Watchfire Digital Outdoor units side-by-side on University Drive. But the role of an urban regeneration and conservation nonprofit in actively promoting the use of digital outdoor media is almost unheard-of in the U.S.
Unfortunately for the nation’s outdoor media owners, however, there are likely to be a lot more Durhams than Huntsvilles to contend with before digital billboards can fulfil their potential.
durhambillboardfacts.com
fairwayoutdoor.com
www.oaaa.org
supportdurhambillboardban.com
www.trav-adsigns.com
www.watchfiredigitaloutdoor.com
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