In 2009, several board members of the Washington, D.C.-based organization Scenic America drove through Missouri while attending conferences on billboard regulation. What they saw of Missouri’s ubiquitous billboards made an impression — and not the good kind.
“We had been told by our peers at the state affiliate of Scenic Missouri to expect mile after mile of billboards, even in rural areas. But the blight was even more widespread than we had expected,” the organization’s national president, Mary Tracy, wrote in the Post-Dispatch in September of that year.
“Even in rural areas, sign after sign blanketed the journey ... (advertising) everything from adult sex shops to vasectomy reversals. We all agreed that no other state in which we have traveled had so much beauty hidden behind so many billboards.”
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Sixteen years later, the shabby view from major highways in outstate Missouri is much the same. It’s especially egregious along Interstate 70, which transects the state from ӣƵ to Kansas City. The 250-mile corridor averages some 3.64 billboards per mile, according to . That’s well over double the number of billboards in other states through which I-70 runs.
Calls over the years to rein in billboard blight in Missouri have always run off the road, but a current effort in the Legislature could finally gain some traction. A multi-billion-dollar project to widen I-70 across the state will unfold over the next five years. It provides the perfect opportunity to rethink and reform Missouri’s billboard jungle.
A resolution moving through the Legislature would create a committee to study the issue and make recommendations that could include more stringent limits on the number and size of the billboards.
Among other ideas that have been aired before is to put a five-year moratorium on new billboards. Lawmakers might also consider raising the annual permit fee for billboards, which currently stands at a paltry $100 per year.
The issue isn’t just the unsightliness of the endless rows of signs. As the Post-Dispatch’s Kurt Erickson reported last week, Missouri has a higher-than-average traffic fatality rate compared with the rest of the U.S. There’s no way to know certain how many of those accidents resulted from the distraction of billboards, but surely it’s a factor.
As Scenic Missouri President John Hock put it, per Erickson’s reporting, the pending resolution is a chance to “have serious discussions about the safety and visual experience of travelers on Missouri roadways.”
That’s a much better message than the one drivers are getting from the billboard blight that crowds Missouri’s highway shoulders. Our state’s natural beauty should be showcased for drivers, not blocked by annoying and unsightly sales pitches.
