Billboard Blight Contagious Not Everyone Opposed To Blocking Scenery

Oh, say can you see?

Maybe not.

If you’re driving through North Idaho, there easily could be a billboard between you and the purple mountain majesty. Commercial areas, where the giant signs are allowed, are increasing along with the Panhandle’s population.

One of the biggest buyers of billboard space is the Idaho travel industry - whose major selling point is the landscape.

“It’s a dilemma,” says Bob Singletary, who operates the private North Idaho Visitors and Information Center. “You’re really caught between promoting what is our major industry, and cluttering our beautiful scenery.”

Singletary has mixed emotions about billboards. For others, this is a no-brainer.

“It’s part of capitalism and democracy,” thunders Bob Templin, who has big signs all over the region touting his Post Falls resort. “I’m a firm believer of always protecting the rights of people to be able to know what’s available, where to go.”

During 55 years in the hospitality business, Templin says, “I’ve never heard any guest tell me your billboards are cluttering the landscape.”

Bob Sloyka would tell him. The Post Falls school principal recently sent a blistering letter to the editor complaining about the visual impact of billboards and phone towers.

“I had lots of feedback from my letter. People appreciated what I wrote. They feel pretty frustrated,” Sloyka says. “We do have a beautiful place. Why obliterate it?”

Billboards are vital to scenic areas, says Kippy Burns, spokeswoman for the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. “You can have your natural beauty, but if no one comes to look at it, what happens? You have no money for your economy.”

The issue has been resolved in only four states, which allow no billboards. They are exceptionally pretty places: Hawaii, Alaska, Vermont and Maine.

Vermont’s sign law is very popular with its travel industry, says Chris Barbieri, president of that state’s Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s really differentiated Vermont as a vacation location. It’s a nice feeling coming to a place where you’re not assaulted with advertising.”

In most states, billboards are governed by a mosaic of state and local laws. Overlaying those is the 1965 Highway Beautification Act, which the Scenic America advocacy group labels a “broken law” that allows 450,000 billboards to remain in the country.

Lobbyists for Scenic America and the Outdoor Advertising Association of America are squaring off over legislation that would give the law sharper teeth.

If Idahoans are seething about billboard blight, they are doing so quietly.

When Kootenai County commissioners pondered a zone change that would allow more billboards along Interstate 90, no one testified against it. Local media didn’t take note until the signs were going up west of Post Falls.

Only the Kootenai Environmental Alliance wrote a letter protesting. The group has done little else about the issue, focusing its attention on water pollution and clear-cuts.

“We’ve got such monumental concerns and problems; we only have so much energy and so many people,” says KEA president Buell Hollister. “But this is an important issue.”

When activists in western Montana complained, they got action.

Citizens for a Better Flathead had seen one too many billboards go up in their valley. They found allies in Missoula, Polson and elsewhere.

“They started raising hell with the governor’s office,” recalls Rich Munger, who handles outdoor advertising permits for the Montana Department of Transportation.

The result: A 1995 law that clamped down on the size, number and location of future billboards.

When the North Idaho Travel Alliance went looking for a place to advertise the Panhandle’s splendors this year, it couldn’t find a billboard available to rent along I-90 in Montana. The alliance did find one near Glacier National Park, to the relief of chairman Jonathan Coe.

“We hope to catch people half a day’s drive away,” he says.

Coe cites University of Idaho research. It found that visitors spend less time in the Panhandle than in other parts of the state. Billboards, Coe says, may get them to linger longer.

Coe convinced the Idaho Travel Council to give the alliance a $7,100 grant to rent billboards. The money comes from room taxes. There were some reservations about using it for that purpose, says council director Carl Wilgus.

“For us, the biggest difficulty with outdoor advertising has much less to do with visual pollution than with return on investment and the ability to measure it,” says Wilgus. “It’s much easier to document the results from print, video, TV advertising.”

Response is hard to track, agrees Bob Hamilton, marketing director at Schweitzer Mountain Resort. But officials at the ski hill consider billboards a useful way to capture a motorists’ attention.

“You’ve basically got three seconds,” says Hamilton. “If the name registers, then he will go look for other information, the brochure or whatever.”

At the Factory Outlets near Post Falls, surveys indicate 16 to 20 percent of customers are drawn by billboard ads, says marketing director Kay Riplinger.

Before they hit the mall and its Interstate 90 exit, eastbound motorists see six billboards, mostly with Factory Outlet ads.

“The I-90 location is very, very popular with businesses,” Riplinger says. “There are 36,000 drive-bys a day.”

Coeur d’Alene Tribal Bingo has a sign there now, along with billboards throughout the region. Marketing director Laura Stensgar says it’s important to tout the location of the bingo hall, which is not in any city but along a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 95.

Stensgar can see why people would object to billboards. But, she says, she hasn’t given any thought to aesthetics. She’s been too busy looking for signs to rent. She says they’re in short supply in the Panhandle.

Peter Grover of Obie Media Corp., a major outdoor advertising firm, says he never hears complaints.

“All we get are people who want to advertise.”

One new place that Obie Media wants to place a sign is along U.S. 95, across from Louisiana-Pacific’s Chilco plant.

The land is zoned commercial (it’s the site of Big Timber Log Homes) and a billboard would require a special use permit. Kootenai County commissioners twice have turned down requests for that, upon the recommendation of hearing officers.

In 1996, hearing officer Jean DeBarbieris wrote that approval would “reduce Highway 95 to one long visual commercial rather than promote its function as a transportation corridor.”

Obie is appealing that decision. If the site were zoned light industrial, there would be no need for that; the billboard could go up without commission approval.

City and county billboard rules can be stronger than state and federal regulations, but rarely are. Attitudes reflected by local regulations are sometimes conflicting.

Kootenai County has no sign ordinance even though its comprehensive plan mentions the need to preserve areas of scenic beauty.

Sandpoint doesn’t allow off-premise business signs. But its Chamber of Commerce is touting the city’s lake scenery on a billboard in Post Falls.

Kellogg banned billboards two years ago, even making Silver Mountain take down a sign advertising its ski gondola. But surrounding Shoshone County goes so far as to rent its own land along the freeway for billboards.

In contrast, a similar rural county in Eastern Washington banned new billboards in June.

That occurred after Obie Media installed a billboard. It happened to go up next to land owned by Pend Oreille County Commissioner Joel Jacobsen of Newport.

“The reason people live up here, often, is because it is beautiful,” Jacobsen said last December. “All of a sudden, it’s not as beautiful as it was before.”

Washington long ago instituted fairly strict billboard rules, in exchange for more federal money to help build its interstates.

Since 1975, Oregon has required a billboard to come down every time one goes up.

Idaho is moving in the opposite direction. A law passed this year says billboards that don’t comply with regulations can’t simply be bought by the government and removed. The state or county must pay for the company’s loss of income, as well.

Montana has no such law. Still, activists in the Flathead Valley see little hope of banishing the existing 273 billboards in the Kalispell and Whitefish area.

“There are lots of other ways to get to travelers that are clean,” says Joan Vetter Ehrenberg. “Vermont does it very well, and Canada does it well.”

Both of those places use small directional signs that point the way to businesses.

Vetter Ehrenberg notes that billboards are forbidden in highly successful tourist towns like Aspen and Jackson Hole.

“Those are cities that have foresight and vision and backbone, and that’s really hard to find.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo