Friday, January 27th, 2006...3:06 pm
Pity the Poor Billboard Conglomerate
The Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled that Clear Channel must remove billboards from along I-10.
This is one of several ongoing legal actions between Clear Channel and various local governments. It is one of many instances where Clear Channel seemed to believe that they don’t need to follow the rules that other companies need to follow.
Clear Channel claimed that since this was land given to them by the Arizona Department of Transportation, that they were not subject to local rules. The land was given to them by ADOT to compensate for billboards that were demolished for freeway work. This is an interesting theory. The state government has sovereign immunity, much in the way that the federal government does. For example, the University of Arizona does not need to follow zoning codes. However, this is land that was given to Clear Channel, which means that it is no longer state land. The court didn’t buy the argument that the land was being given for a public purpose and enjoys protection as state land.
Interesting, that. Building billboards is a public purpose?
I’m not a lawyer, but if this worked, imagine the possibilities. The land where I am sitting right now was homesteaded 110, maybe 120 years ago. So it was federal land, given away for the public interest of moving people west. I no longer need to follow state law then, right?
At least this time, Clear Channel actually tried to use the courts. In the past, Clear Channel and its predecessors (Eller, Whiteco) would do things like send out crews at night to modify billboards or build new billboards without permits then claim that the big, bad goverment wasn’t letting them do their buisiness.
This also shows that if local government sticks to their guns, they can win these cases since the law is on their side. The technique that the billboard industry has used is to keep appeals up for years and hope that local governments will stop wanting to pay the lawyers at some point. It would have been a dangerous precedent to settle on their terms. It would show that all an industry would have to do to avoid any local regulation, maybe zoning codes, maybe health codes, would be to sue and wait until the locals give up.
NB - This wasn’t the only incident of ADOT cutting deals with the billboard companies without respecting local regulations or needs. My second or third meeting of the sign code committee, a representative of ADOT wanted us to pass a resolution asking the City Council pay Whiteco, the company that owned the billboards at the time, for billboards demolished for state road work. Given that the city was suing Whiteco at the time over those same billboards, and that the ADOT representative had to admit that no locality had ever been asked to do this, we passed a resolution against it instead.
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