Tacoma billboard hearing to feature last-minute staff proposal

A public hearing Tuesday on possible changes to Tacoma’s billboard laws will feature dueling proposals, one from the citizen-led city Planning Commission that’s the result of months of public work.

The other, from city staff, saw the light of day for the first time last week.

Two leaders of the planning commission are so concerned about the two-pronged approach that they sent a letter of complaint to the council on Saturday evening. It asserts the staff doesn’t have legal authority to offer alternatives to the council that conflict with the commission’s recommendations.

The letter, from commission chairman Chris Beale and member Don Erickson, calls the city staff proposal a “dangerous precedent” that could allow staff to “bypass the public hearing requirement” for changes to city law.

City Manager T.C. Broadnax disputed those characterizations. He said citizens and the council should hear about competing ideas, and they should know those ideas are headed for a public airing ahead of time.

“I don’t think anything we’re doing is inappropriate,” Broadnax said Saturday. “We’re trying to be transparent about things we’re not in agreement with, or that may need further consideration from the City Council.”

The double-barreled hearing is the latest unusual move in a saga over outdoor advertising structures that began more than five years ago. That’s when the council announced a surprise legal settlement with Clear Channel Outdoor that called for allowing digital billboards in exchange for removal of regular ones. Clear Channel had filed suit against the city in 2007, claiming the city’s law intended to reduce the number of billboards in town was unconstitutional.

Public outcry against digital billboards was swift. The council backed away from the settlement and instead banned digital billboards all together. Clear Channel sued again. Then, in 2012, the company and the city agreed to hit pause on the court battles and try to find a solution.

First a 17-member “community working group” took a whack at it. The group was made up of representatives from, among other groups: neighborhood councils, business districts, billboard owners, the advertising industry and nonprofit organizations, which benefit from free or reduced-price advertising from billboard companies.

The council took the group’s broad framework and kicked it back to the Planning Commission for more work.

In October, the commission sent its final recommendations to the council. Among other things, the commission recommended keeping amortization — a type of law intended to allow billboard owners time to make money on their billboards before requiring their removal. Amortization has been part of city law since 1997 and is the reason Clear Channel sued in the first place.

A few weeks before the commission sent its final report to the council, a city staff member called amortization a “poison pill” to any legal settlement and mentioned for the first time a possible legal settlement on a separate track from the commission’s work.

Planning commission member Erickson, who also is the group’s former chairman, said city code is “pretty emphatic” that any changes related to development, zoning and other such topics must go through the commission. The staff should have presented its ideas to the commission first, he said, so it could have followed the public process and held hearings before the council heard the idea and held its own hearings.

Erickson said he couldn’t recall another example of staff bypassing the volunteer group, whose members are appointed by the council.

“This is a real anomaly,” he said. “And to have an anomaly on such a sensitive issue is really strange.”

Among other things, the staff alternative calls for the council to change city law and give itself authority to enter into something called a “special compliance agreement.” The agreement then could require billboard owners to remove specific structures by specific times in a way city code does not, said planning division manager Brian Boudet.

Amortization would remain the law, but any party to the agreement wouldn’t have to abide by it.

The staff’s goal, Boudet said, was to both reduce the number of billboards in Tacoma while ending the legal battle. Enforcement of amortization is in the way, he said.

Tacoma has tried for decades to move billboards out of places they’re not wanted and into parts of town more suited to them, he said. The city’s approach “hasn’t worked particularly well,” he said. “The staff alternative is to look at other means to achieve those basic goals.”

While everyone involved accurately refers to the law as applying to all “billboard owners,” Clear Channel is the 900-pound gorilla. It owns almost every affected structure in Tacoma — 302 of 311 billboard “faces” and 165 of 169 billboard structures. Two other companies own the tiny lot leftover.

One of the leading voices of billboard opponents calls the staff’s idea “contract zoning,” a term typically related to real estate development.

“Some developer wants to do a project and threatens a lawsuit, and instead of a lawsuit (the elected officials) enter into a contract and let the developer have what they want,” said Doug Schafer, chairman of the Central Tacoma Neighborhood Council.

Schafer is disgusted.

“How can city officials be this devious and proceed with a public process and in the background engage in private deal-making?” he said.

Broadnax said no deal-making has gone on. Clear Channel had “absolutely” no influence in the drafting of the staff alternative, he said. Company representatives were part of the community working group, he said, and have “been very attuned to Planning Commission discussions.”

A “special compliance agreement” with Clear Channel doesn’t yet exist, Broadnax emphasized. “Right now it’s just a framework — an idea and a concept” that could allow for the city to get rid of specific billboards faster than merely enforcing the code.

Clear Channel representatives did not make themselves available for an interview. In a written statement attributed to the president of the company’s Seattle/Tacoma division, Clear Channel said it has “participated in a collaborative process that has resulted in constructive dialogue among all stakeholders working to develop a fair and comprehensive sign ordinance for Tacoma” and that it plans to “continue working cooperatively with the City.”

Beale, the planning commission chairman, said that while the seeming violations of public process is the biggest concern, he also was surprised that the staff alternative didn’t seem to be based on any work done by the planning commission.

“It’s not a minor shift here or there,” he said. “It’s wholesale things we didn’t even talk about.” For example, the staff alternative allows the continued use of pole billboard structures and of “bulletin” sized billboards — very large signs that measure about 672 square feet.

Clear Channel and some nonprofit organizations want those signs, but “neighborhood groups and normal people” do not.

Additionally, Beale said, the level of detail in the staff alternative makes him think the staff was working on it at the same time the planning commission was working on its ideas. Beale said other commissioners are “perturbed” that staff didn’t ask the group for input.

Beale said the staff alternative did have a positive element: It would get rid of some billboards faster than the commission’s recommendations would.

“But it’s hard to say who’s in the driver’s seat on drafting this,” he said. “It seems like it’s not based on the work that we’ve done.”

Broadnax said the city learned from its mistakes in 2010 — before his tenure began — when the first legal settlement surprised the community. That’s why the staff alternative was released before Tuesday’s hearing. If the council moves ahead with creating “special compliance agreements,” the public shouldn’t feel “that it’s coming out of nowhere,” he said.

After all of this, it’s still possible that the city will face Clear Channel in court. Councilmembers have said for years that such a fight would be too expensive and time-consuming, though Broadnax said whatever cost analysis that supports that assertion probably “hasn’t been refreshed” recently.

City planner Boudet said that, as he sees it, the council has three options: Change nothing, which means enforcing the 1997 law and drawing a lawsuit; adopt something similar to the planning commission’s rules and hope to avoid a lawsuit; or enact the staff alternative.

“The council’s the only one that can make that decision,” he said.

This story was originally published November 15, 2015 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Tacoma billboard hearing to feature last-minute staff proposal."