Cities should have limits

Mayor Ralph Becker’s effort to limit electronic billboards in Salt Lake City has angered the sign industry, which has run crying for relief to the oligarchs on Utah’s Capitol Hill. As usual when any business interest is threatened, however remotely, the oligarchs are ready to oblige.

Sen. Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, and Rep. Mel Brown, R-Coalville, both have introduced bills to pre-empt Salt Lake City’s plan.

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Becker’s proposal would work like this: If the sign mongers agree to take down a billboard in a residential neighborhood, they could transfer it to a heavily commercial or manufacturing zone. The net effect would be no more billboards overall, but more electronic billboards would be allowed in a larger area of the city. There currently are six electronic billboards in the city and 145 billboards overall.

Both bills would outlaw any city from requiring "an owner of an existing nonconforming or conforming billboard to forfeit any other billboard owned by the same owner in order to upgrade the existing nonconforming or conforming billboard to an electronic or mechanical changeable message sign," the bill reads.

Both bills would give owners carte blanche to convert existing billboards to electronic signs.

They also would order a city or county that wants to eliminate a billboard to begin eminent domain proceedings against the owner and pay the sign’s market value, plus legal fees.

Fair is fair. No government should be able to seize private property without just compensation. But we fail to see why a city or county should not be able to require a billboard company to give up a conventional sign in order to create or convert another one to a much more valuable electronic version, especially considering that garish electronic signs impose additional visual clutter, distractions and light pollution that everyone in the community has to endure.

Utah communities should have the power to prevent their major roads from metastasizing into a smaller version of the Las Vegas strip.

Niederhauser is correct that businesses have a basic right to advertise.

But that doesn’t mean that they have an unlimited right to invade everyone else’s outdoor visual space.

Billboard companies have long used campaign donations to buy themselves special status in Utah law. It’s time to call a halt and for the oligarchs to stay out of local elected leaders’ efforts to control billboard blight.