Tacoma’s City Council called Tuesday for quickly removing at least 190 billboards, and possibly dozens more, reigniting a legal fight with sign owner Clear Channel Outdoor.
The council voted 7-1, with Joe Lonergan opposed and Spiro Manthou absent, to tighten zoning restrictions, set a new deadline for removing signs that don’t comply and ban the modern versions of billboards that switch messages electronically.
By keeping digital billboards out of Tacoma, the council backs out of a legal settlement with Clear Channel that it had approved unanimously last year.
The deal would have allowed digital billboards in exchange for removal of traditional signs. Though that part has been rendered defunct, the agreement also calls on the city to pay Clear Channel the market value of future billboards it is forced to tear down – ammunition for a court challenge, though city lawyers say they have arguments to marshal against it.
The new ordinance “has the potential to cost the taxpayers millions of dollars,” Michael Mayes, Clear Channel Outdoor’s Seattle real estate director, told the council. “It opens the city up to additional legal exposure and significant financial risk.”
Councilmen David Boe and Marty Campbell proposed the law, which doubles the required space between billboards and places such as parks, churches, schools and residential and historic districts, to 500 feet.
The new code requires billboards to be centered on their structures. It adds landscaping and lighting requirements, including a ban on flashing lights.
“It’s not eliminating billboards,” Boe said. “Billboards are going to be here – in the right context, in the right setting, in the right maintenance, in the right quality.”
City planners say they haven’t determined how many more signs will become “nonconforming” under the proposed rules. In a previous count, staffers had determined roughly 190 of the city’s 250 billboard faces didn’t conform to the old rules.
All nonconforming signs would have to be removed within six months. Permits that allow companies to replace a demolished billboard in a new spot would expire after a year. Clear Channel holds about 170 of those relocation permits.
Among those that would have to come down is the sign that towers over the It’s Greek to Me restaurant at Sixth and Division avenues, jutting like a flag from its pole.
The prospect that it might come down brightened a chilly summer for Britton Sukys, who owns a home near the site.
“We’re not eliminating outdoor advertising,” Sukys said. “We’re just moving it to where it belongs in the city, which is not my front yard, let’s face it.”
But Dale Reed said the city is devaluing his property, where the restaurant building and billboard have sat since the late 1980s.
“We bought commercial property under codes that allowed us to make this income,” said Reed, who rents to Clear Channel. “The bigger story here is that the city is arbitrarily taking value away from property owners.”
The council in 1997 set a 10-year time limit for nonconforming billboards to come down, but a Clear Channel lawsuit halted enforcement.
The sole dissenter Tuesday, Lonergan, said it’s unwise to set up the city for another legal battle that could take a decade or more to resolve.
The council didn’t heed the Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber, who entered the debate with a blog post this week that called on the city to stick to its settlement with Clear Channel and “uphold its commitments to the business community.”
But chamber CEO Tom Pierson said he was glad the council left the door open to return to the issue of digital billboards.
“At some point in the future, in the near future, we’re going to have a serious conversation about digital and talk about where digital can fit into our landscape, because I do think it’s possible,” Mayor Marilyn Strickland said.
Both Strickland and the chamber noted city government has its own electronic signs at Cheney Stadium and the Tacoma Dome.
Those are on-premises signs, as opposed to off-premises billboards that are affected by the new restrictions. Boe and Strickland said the city needs to set fair standards for all digital signs.
Jordan Schrader: 360-786-1826
jordan.schrader@thenewstribune.com
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