Cedar Rapids board wants review of billboard rules

Steve Allsop is a dynamo of a small-business owner who is quick to talk in David-and-Goliath terms.

Allsop, who started, built up and sold a sign production company a few years ago and now owns a small Cedar Rapids billboard company, MediaQuest Outdoor, has caught the attention of city officials of late as he scurries to win approval to erect billboards on what he says are the last few spots in the city where city regulations can be tweaked to allow them.

Billboard behemoth, Lamar Advertising, owns most of the billboards in the city.

Sufficiently pesky has Allsop been, in fact, that the city's Board of Adjustment last week called on the city's planning staff to put together a report about the city's current billboard ordinance to see if exceptions to it should be allowed and also to see how the ordinance should address digital billboard signs with advertisements that change every several seconds. The city's ordinance doesn't address those.

“I'm concerned about signs everywhere,” said board member Bill Vernon in what he called the “creeping scope” of signage in the city. “… The exception has become the rule.”

In fact, what Allsop says are the last few spots available for billboards in Cedar Rapids do require some regulatory exception in the form of a conditional use permit or a variance from city regulations, which is why Allsop and his MediaQuest company have been showing up at the city's City Planning Commission and the city's Board of Adjustment with enough regularity to be noticed.

Last week the Board of Adjustment approved a conditional use permit for Allsop to erect a billboard near Edgewood Road and Johnson Avenue NW on property zoned C-2, a less-intense commercial zoning classification that requires a special permit not required for billboards in more intense C-3 areas or industrial areas. However, Allsop said it's nearly impossible to identify a C-3 spot or an industrial spot in the city that meets the city's other regulatory criteria.

Billboards and other off-premise signs that advertise for a business nearby, for instance, can't be closer than 1,000 feet to one another; they need to be 200 feet from residential property, parks, schools and churches; and new signs along a state highway in cities must clear additional state standards.

At the same time, last week, the Board of Adjustment put on hold a second Allsop request for a new billboard on Blairs Ferry Road NE near C Avenue NE because it needs a variance from the city regulation so it can stand closer than 200 feet to residential property.

“We're a small company compared to one that has nearly a monopoly, and we want equal treatment under the codes,” Allsop said more than once at the public meeting. In a subsequent interview, he said that a number of billboards owned by Lamar Advertising don't meet current city standards, but were grandfathered in under old rules, a fact that Mark Wold, Lamar's general manager, said is true.

Cedar Rapids city officials last week identified 80 billboards in the city - there are an additional number of off-premise signs that don't sell ads, but simply identify a business nearby. According to the city figures, Lamar Advertising owns 64 of the 80 billboard sites and MediaQuest 12, though the companies' numbers differ a little from those provided by the city. Some of the discrepancy may come from that the fact that the companies are counting billboards on the Marion side of the Cedar Rapids-Marion border or because they are counting two billboards on one site.

Lamar's Wold said that Lamar is generally pleased with the “status quo” for billboards in the city and pleased with the city's regulations as now written.

A change in the city's billboard ordinance to permit billboards in a broader range of property classifications might result in a few more billboards in the city, but not many more, Wold said. For now, he said Lamar is likely to add one or two more digital signs at its current billboard sites by 2015, but not a lot more. He and MediaQuest's Allsop said Lamar now has four digital signs and MediaQuest, six.

Next door, the city of Marion updated its billboard ordinance in 2011 into one that is more restrictive than Cedar Rapids' and limits new billboards in Marion to three four-lane highways, Highway 100, Highway 13 and Highway 151 east of Highway 13, said Tom Treharne, Marion's director of planning and development.

The thought behind the Marion ordinance, Treharne said, is that billboard messages typically target higher-speed traffic, not traffic inside the city.

“Billboards are not something that from a planning perspective we're really excited to see, to be brutally honest,” he said.

For digital signs with changing advertisements, Marion requires 10 seconds between changes, while some cities only require 8 seconds, added Dave Hockett, assistant director of planning and development in Marion. Cedar Rapids does not have a standard. Marion also requires billboards to be 300 feet from residential property, while Cedar Rapids requires only a 200-foot separation.

Hockett said sign companies still can appeal the new sign restrictions to Marion's Board of Adjustment. “But they might not get a lot of staff support,” he said.

In Cedar Rapids and Marion, large billboards can be 672 square feet in size, which are virtual giants compared to billboards in Iowa City. There the maximum size is 72 square feet, Jan Ream, code enforcement assistant for the city of Iowa City, said. In addition, Iowa City does not allow digital advertising boards that change ads every several seconds, she said, though the city does permit small electronic signs in certain areas to change a message once an hour.

“We don't have a lot of call for billboards in Iowa City,” she said.

Brent Christian, right of way agent at the Iowa Department of Transportation, said the state of Iowa has permits for 3,071 billboard signs on Iowa's non-Interstate highways and 380 on its Interstates, with 225 and 39 added respectively in the two classifications in the last five years. At the same time, 105 billboards on the state's Interstates have been removed in the last five years, he said.

On Iowa's highways now labeled “scenic byways,” such as the Lincoln Highway Heritage Byway, no new billboards are permitted, Christian said.

MediaQuest's Allsop said his company has managed to erect 40 billboards or other off-premise signs in the Cedar Rapids metro area and in the area reaching beyond that.

But he said the layers of regulations in and outside of the city make it hard to imagine that either he or anyone else will be adding many more signs in the Cedar Rapids area.

“I've studied this thing inside and out, and I say to you in all sincerity, there just aren't that many places left (in Cedar Rapids),” Allsop said.

Allsop suggested that the city would be wasting its time and money on a study to try to toughen its existing billboard ordinance when he said only a handful of possibilities exist now for new billboards inside the city.

Vern Zakostelecky, a planner in the city's Community Development Department, suggested a quick, cheap way to change the city's billboard ordinance: don't grant any more variances to squeeze billboards into places where they are not permitted without an exception.

As for the new, digital billboards, Allsop said he didn't think the city would see too many more because of the expense to build them.