More billboards for Cedar Rapids? City Planning Commission suggests how KGAN-TV can make its electronic sign legal as an advertising billboard; will other property owners follow?

More advertising billboards in this city with a tough billboard ordinance may be in the offing if a zoning strategy outlined Tuesday by the City Planning Commission to help KGAN-TV is duplicated elsewhere.

About a year ago, KGAN-TV erected a new video sign on its property along Collins Road NE with a city permit that allowed the sign to be used as an “on-premise” sign to promote the television station and its programming.

The station, though, started using the sign to sell advertising, which is illegal on property in the city's office-service zoning category where KGAN-TV finds itself.

A citizen complaint alerted the city to KGAN-TV's misuse of the sign, and the city ordered the station to stop using the sign to advertise and told it to limit the sign's use to promoting the television station and its programming.

KGAN-TV is now trying to figure out a way to legally sell advertising on the sign.

Peter Paisley, who joined the station in June as general manager, pointed out to the City Planning Commission on Tuesday that the sign cost the station $300,000.

The station had wanted to rezone a piece of its property on which the sign stands to an agricultural zoning category, which would allow the station then to ask the commission and then the city's Board of Adjustment for a conditional-use permit to allow the sign to be used as an advertising billboard.

Instead, commission members suggested that the station consider trying to rezone the piece of property with the sign on it to a commercial designation and ask at the same time for a conditional use permit so the station's sign could be used to sell advertising.

KGAN-TV's Paisley asked if the commission could somehow accelerate the sign matter because the station was losing an income-generating stream by not being able to use the sign to sell advertising.

Vern Zakostelecky, the city's land development coordinator and city representative to the City Planning Commission, suggested that the station was losing no income because a sign for use to sell advertising never has been permitted at the KGAN-TV site.

Commission member Allan Thoms said KGAN-TV is in the advertising business and the station paid a lot of money for the sign, and he suggested the commission should see what it could do to move the matter forward.

Paisley said the use of the sign outside KGAN-TV as an advertising billboard was something new for the station. He said the station hoped to add the sign to “our media mix.” He suggested the station would package advertising for broadcast, online and the billboard.

Paisley called it “stupid” that somehow those at the station before he arrived in June had not gotten the correct permit before the station erected the new sign. The correct permit, though, was not allowed in the office-service designation without first going through the process the station now is going through.

At Tuesday's commission meeting, commission member Marty Rowlet wondered if the city had fined KGAN-TV for misusing the sign to sell advertising. Zakostelecky said no.

Rowlett said she wondered why the commission was being asked for “forgiveness rather than permission in the first place.”

Phil Garland, president of Nesper Sign Advertising Inc. of Cedar Rapids, said on Tuesday that Nesper secured the permit for KGAN-TV from the city in August 2008 for an on-premise sign, not a billboard for advertisements. Nesper built the sign, but it doesn't have anything to do with its content, Garland said.

After Tuesday's commission meeting, Thoms, the commission vice chairman, said the commission would have to wait and see if other property owners now in the city's office-service zoning category might also seek to change a part of their property to a commercial designation and seek to erect advertising billboards on their property.

Thoms noted that, in any case, other property owners, such as is the case with KGAN-TV, still need to secure a conditional-use permit to allow an advertising billboard.

“You still have to come in and make a case for that,” he said. “So it's not an automatic thing when it's a conditional use.”

Back in 2006, billboard companies in Cedar Rapids unsuccessfully pushed the city to soften its billboard ordinance to permit more billboards.