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controversy bright lights Billboards a concern
Electronic billboards spell controversy
Date published: 4/24/2007
by Hugh Muir
Some 500 dazzling new-era advertising signs have lit up across the nation in the past few years; three of them are prominently on display in Stafford County.
One result of their presence has been growing public concern over safety.
The Stafford Planning Commission will hold a public hearing May 16 to discuss those billboards. The debate focuses mainly on whether the signs pose a safety threat to drivers by distracting their attention. Meanwhile, preservationists and historians call the bright lights a blight on the landscape.
County officials fear that the signs can be similar to television screens or computer monitors where images change periodically.
Each high-tech billboard, approximately 8 feet by 20 feet, sits atop a pole that is two stories tall. It is made up of thousands of light-emitting diodes similar to the bright bulbs in the taillights of new vehicles.
The signs alternate some half dozen static ads every eight seconds. The law forbids changes more often than every six seconds, which would be seen as a distraction.
The three electronic billboards in Stafford are on U.S. 1 just north of the intersection with U.S. 17, on U.S. 17 west of the University of Mary Washington School of Graduate and Professional Studies and on Garrisonville Road west of Interstate 95. They were installed within the past year.
Their appearance has triggered the Planning Commission to review the county's regulation of billboards in general and of electronic signs in particular.
Meeting to discuss the issue last Wednesday, the members accepted an ordinance that tightly defined how billboards function, how they are maintained and where they can be placed. It also reaffirmed county ordinances passed in 1994 that forbid new billboards of any kind.
"The good news," Deputy County Attorney Stephen G. Judy told the commission, "is we can prevent any more of these billboards." This can be done, he said, through the existing classification of "nonconforming billboards."
Judy pointed out that any billboard lawfully erected before Aug. 9, 1994, that is larger than 50 square feet (standard billboards are triple that size) is a non-conforming billboard. Therefore no billboard within the county should be allowed to be converted into an electronic billboard since the cost far exceeds the "replacement cost, new" of existing nonconforming signs.
The present electronic billboards have been adaptations of existing poster-style billboard structures. One of the questions raised by county planners is how the conversion of older billboards into LED signs fits within the legal financial restrictions on the cost of maintaining and repairing large road signs. Present law states that the cost of renovating a billboard can be no more than 50 percent of the cost of erecting a brand-new sign.
"The cost of an LED sign can be $500,000," Judy pointed out, which is far more than the total cost of an entire traditional billboard.
Read more stories about Stafford
Date published: 4/24/2007
Most recent reader comments:
Ok by me.
(posted by
Alan
, Sep. 25, 2007 2:41 pm)
So they change ads. Big deal. Cellphones are a bigger distraction. Advertising is Free Enterprise. They're in historic, picturesque areas? I'm missing that somehow.
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