 "Photo: John Gilchrist")
Passersby can barely see the back of the billboard that sits behind Colonial Bank on Fifth at Nueces streets, but members of Scenic Austin fear the owner is waiting to relocate the board to a main Austin street.
In 2005, Austin City Council weakened the city's 1986 ordinance that made it illegal to build new billboards but allowed existing billboards to be relocated to other parts of the city.
Scenic Austin President Girard Kinney said that in the past, new landowners wanted billboards in their lots removed to make room for new buildings. But since billboards can be moved elsewhere, they may never be fully nonexistent.
"Council members want to eliminate billboards, but at the same time, they voted in favor of them. That has assured us we will never get rid of them," Kinney said. "I have yet to know a human being that has benefited from a billboard. It just distracts the beauty behind them - man-made or
natural."
The council plans to address these issues at its meeting on Thursday by banning the relocation of billboards, forbidding mobile billboards, requiring energy-efficient lighting on billboards, creating an online database of the city's billboards and requiring owners to pay an annual $220 for billboard registration.
Councilman Mike Martinez said he sees "crappy and cruddy" unused billboards as he drives home on Martin Luther King Jr. and Airport boulevards - billboards he feels should be taken down and possibly relocated to Ben White Boulevard, which is near an airport and not considered a scenic area.
Martinez said he is concerned with the two mobile billboard companies in Austin that drive down busy streets, adding to traffic and pollution.
"It's an industry that does not speak to the value of Austin," he said.
Scenic Austin members are concerned council members would allow billboard companies to expand the current restricted billboard size from 300 square feet to 672 square feet, but Martinez said an expansion such as that is not proposed.
"It's politics," Kinney said. "Outdoor advertising folks donate a lot of money to council campaigns, and it can be hard to resist."
