St. Paul may be the smaller of the Twin Cities, but it surpasses Minneapolis by one measure that some of its citizens lament: population of billboards. According to
Scenic Saint Paul, an anti-billboard group, Minnesota's capital city has by far the greatest number of billboards of any city in the state--505 at last count.
It's a number that has dropped slightly as outdoor advertising companies trade existing, traditional-format signs for the right, under a 2007 ordinance, to erect digital billboards elsewhere. A 1990s moratorium on new billboards in St. Paul remains in force but
didn't translate into victory for a 1999 initiative to remove half the
city's stock.
Battles over billboard have gone on in St. Paul for more than a century, by Scenic Saint Paul's reckoning. The latest salvo came last month when, as
The Line noted, a federal appeals court sided with the outdoor industry, nullifying St. Paul's 2006 ban on billboard extensions--those attention-grabbing protrusions the companies sometimes build out from their boards' ordinary flat rectangles.
The St. Paul group has extended its campaign to rein in outdoor ads from the main battleground of the capital city through the formation of another group,
Scenic Minnesota, which in turn is an affiliate organization of the national organization Scenic America.
Within St. Paul, the group's volunteers have mapped an uneven
distribution of billboards. "If you don't have billboards in your
neighborhood, you don't think it's a problem," says communications
director Gerald Mischke. He said even with fewer billboards to regulate,
city staff in Minneapolis seemed daunted by the group's offer to create
a similar map there.
The groups assert that outdoor advertising companies don't have the right to profit off public "viewsheds" or what people see when they simply look around: "Billboard companies are selling something they do not own--the public's collective field of vision."
Source: Gerald Mischke, Scenic Minnesota
Writer: Chris Steller