Cutting Off a Billboard Abuse

The California Supreme Court, in a unanimous ruling, has upheld a narrow interpretation of laws controlling the location of billboards. That is a welcome ruling.

Officials of the state Department of Transportation hailed the decision as “most important,” and so it is. It is important because it cuts off, here and now, the risk of abuses of the law that limits billboards to commercial and industrial zones.

The controversy centered on a proposal to install five lighted, double-sided billboards in the unincorporated town of Baker adjacent to Interstate 15, the highway that links Los Angeles with Las Vegas. San Bernardino County had only conditionally permitted commercial activity in the area, but the sign company was able to win county approval on the ground that the signs would meet the legal requirement of being within 1,000 feet of commercial or industrial activity.

An appeal court had ruled against the state and had upheld the proposal for the billboards. But the state Supreme Court wisely insisted that a conditional use of the land for commercial purposes does not meet the requirements of the law. Outdoor advertising may be placed only on land that is zoned primarily for commercial or industrial use, according to the ruling of the Supreme Court.

“A remote junction harboring a dusty service station, a small cafe and a defunct mine would not generally justify a commercial zone and does not constitute the conglomeration of true business enterprises in which the Legislature intended to allow the placement of billboards,” Justice Stanley Mosk affirmed in the ruling.

“It is outposts of this sort, conjuring images of the grizzled prospector or the eccentric hermit, that draw many travelers to the nearly barren desert, and it is here that illuminated billboards would be most incongruous,” he added.

There were other risks beyond view pollution. Federal funding for the state under provisions of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act could have been put in jeopardy. But the critical risk was the one that Mosk cited--the risk to the landscape. The plan for billboards in Baker was in effect a formula for a distortion of the law that would have allowed a spread of billboards around remote and isolated commercial uses. Every hotdog stand near an interstate highway could have been host to a dozen illuminated signs in the 1,000-foot radius allowed--a harsh barrier between passing motorists and the natural wonders of California.