Billboard companies and property owners who lease their land for billboards urged the Salisbury Planning Board Tuesday to leave them alone.
“We have done everything in this community that we have been asked to do,” said Jim Pridgen, general manager of Fairway Outdoor Advertising. “Now we’re talking about changing the ordinance again.”
The Planning Board held a courtesy hearing Tuesday to receive input from the public — pros and cons — about billboards. At the board’s request, Salisbury City Council recently passed a six-month moratorium on new billboards and the relocation of any existing signs while planners study the issue.
In North Carolina, 87 municipalities and two counties prohibit billboards. Senior Planner Harold Poole estimates that Salisbury now has 25 to 30 billboards.
Before the moratorium, the Zoning Ordinance allowed billboards in overlay districts along Interstate 85 and portions of Jake Alexander Boulevard and South Main Street.
The city enacted a sign ordinance in 1986, with a 7 1/2- year grace period that expired in November 1993. After that, companies had to remove 17 non-conforming billboards. Others along federal-aid primary roads, such as U.S. 70, were allowed to remain because the city did not want to compensate the companies for removing them.
On Tuesday, company representatives made many of the same points heard during debate over the 1986 sign law.
They said businesses such as hotels, restaurants, service stations and hospitals rely on billboards for advertising. They said the state’s highway logo system at I-85 exits was too limiting and discriminating.
They added that billboards were good for the community, bringing in business and government revenues.
Three owners of billboard properties also defended the highway signs.
William Earnhardt and his wife lease property on Bendix Drive to a billboard company. He asked how taking down billboards would better the quality of life in Salisbury.
Earnhardt warned that Salisbury risks gaining a reputation as anti-business. The income from the billboard property represented about 25 percent of the couple’s retirement income, Earnhardt said, stressing that billboards lead to business, which leads to jobs, which lead to a good economy.
William Brown, representing Beavco, said the company’s three billboards in Salisbury were an important source of revenue and crucial to the businesses advertising on them. The local company has billboards on Lutheran Synod Drive, South Main Street and Bendix Drive.
The Lutheran Synod Drive billboard will be lost in the I-85 widening project. “We would like to see it replaced farther back on the property,” Brown said.
Brown noted that Salisbury offers roughly 1,000 hotel rooms. In the past year, the Concord Mills exit alone in Cabarrus County added 1,000 rooms. Competition is tough, and Salisbury shouldn’t be making it harder on local businesses, Brown said.
Curry Krider said the I-85 widening project will cost him a billboard site he leases to Infinity Outdoor Advertising. He also would like the chance to replace that sign, Krider said.
In his own personal survey of billboards along I-85, Krider said many are older, wooden billboards dating back to the 1950s and 1960s, and he acknowledged that they aren’t attractive. Instead of eliminating the billboard locations, Krider said, the city might want to consider new sign design standards.
Skeet Long, representing Infinity Outdoor, said billboards were part of Americana and not evil as they are sometimes portrayed.
Long said he has traveled in Europe and in Munich, Germany, in particular, where billboards are not allowed. “But you can never find anything,” Long complained. “That’s not America ... It’s amazing to me how this (anti-billboard sentiment) has gotten into our thinking.”
A spokesman for Triad Investment Co. said that as an issue of fairness, the Salisbury ordinance already severely limits where billboards can be placed, while allowing other uses much more latitude throughout the city.
He said I-85, in particular, is a commercial corridor not a scenic highway.
Pridgen, of Fairway Outdoor Advertising, said a moratorium usually suggests a problem. But, he asked, where is the problem in Salisbury?
In the last year, only two permits for new billboards were issued — one to Fairway, he said.
Charles Webster, a resident of South Ellis Street, wholly supported any efforts to eliminate billboards. He said logo signs on the interstate provide adequate information, and he suggested that billboards contributed to “visual pollution.”
Webster argued for getting rid of non-conforming billboards now and putting others on an amortization schedule to eventually come down. He said he has been in cities where billboards were so prevalent that all the signs became confusing to the traveler.
“I don’t want Salisbury to be that kind of city,” Webster said.
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