Senate Legislation Would Damage Highway Beautification Act
The amendment is attached to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill, which was drafted as a primary funding stream for both Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.

Last month, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill that would have, permitted 13 states in the South and Southeast to opt out of provisions of the Highway Beautification Act (HBA) regarding older, destroyed billboards that do not conform to federal and state law and regulations.  The measure was stripped out of the bill in the House-Senate conference committee, do in part to concerted opposition by a number of organizations, including ASLA.  Had the amendment remained in the bill it  would have allowed billboards that don’t comply with current guidelines to be rebuilt. It would have affected not only states that were affected by the hurricanes, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, but others in the designated regions, such as New Mexico, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Senator Robert Bennett of Utah sponsored the amendment.  The Emergency Supplemental Bill—without this attack on the HBA—was signed into law by President Bush last Thursday.

Current federal regulations regarding the HBA say that if a nonconforming billboard is knocked down in a storm, it has to stay down and cannot be reconstructed. One of the principal goals of the HBA was specifically to get rid of these nonconforming signs, particularly those along rural and scenic stretches of the federal-aid highway system. The billboards in question are in most cases the old wooden signs that have been in place on rural highways for 30–50 years, and are located in places where they would not be permitted to be built today. Because they were pre-existing when the HBA became law, they were grandfathered in and allowed to remain, rather than be torn down altogether.

The Emergency Supplemental appropriations legislation  establishes a primary funding stream both for Hurricane Katrina recovery and the Iraq war. Although the billboard amendment was ostensibly related to the hurricanes last year, it was really a vehicle—one might say a Trojan horse—through which billboard companies were advocating a much broader change in federal policy, and not for the better. The measure’s essential aim was to take the teeth out of the HBA.

ASLA joined an effort by Scenic America,  reaching out to key members of the House and Senate to draw their attention to the issue and make them aware of our shared concerns. See the following resources for more information:

Letter to Senate Conferees
Letter to Transportation Committee Leaders in both Houses.
Click here for a link to Scenic America’s Issue Brief

For more information, contact Scott Kovarovics, Manager Federal Government Affairs, at skovarovics@asla.org.