Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2010 > November > 27 > Entry
Giving No Holiday Thanks for Eye Junk
Temple rests on sylvan hills. Waco maintains a riverside recreation area, Cameron Park, that rivals Zilker Park in beauty and utility.
The city limits of Houston and Fort Worth hold vast, green, walkable, ethnically varied neighborhoods. Galveston is laced with tiny Victorian treasures rarely viewed by visitors headed to the beach or the big tourist attractions.
If you didn’t know these things, you are not alone. That’s because each of these cities — visited during the recent Thanksgiving break — clutter their the entry highways, which serve as their front porches, with miles and miles of distracting eye junk. And that’s what the casual visitor remembers.
Greater Austin does the same thing. From San Marcos to Georgetown, we present visitors with hideous billboards, junk yards, junk buildings and enough rusting metal to service the steel industry’s recycling needs for years.
Why address the issue of eye junk in this social column? Because the way we treat our visitors on our collective front porches says something about the way we relate socially to the world — and to each other.
Also, this column is dedicated to the American-Statesman’s campaign to restore wildflowers to the region’s highways, parks and schools through the Lady Bird’s Legacy program.
Our influential former first lady also targeted billboards and other eye junk in her lifelong efforts to improve rural, urban and suburban landscapes, all related to her environmental and planning concerns.
The fact that the outdoor advertising industry gutted much of the billboard regulation in the 1965 highway beautification act, which Johnson pushed, doesn’t mean her admirers should simply betray her memory and her trust.
Some highway stretches within the so-called TexaPlex — the triangular configuration of Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin-San Antonio and Houston — have survived without much blemish.
The farmlands between Hillsboro and Fort Worth soothe; most of the woodlands between Bastrop and Columbus thrive; even certain toll roads whose builders did not succumb to commercial pressure to include service roads avoided the inevitable uglification.
And one must admit: Billboards can serve vital purposes. For instance, they can steer the driver to roadside amenities — restaurants, motels, gas stations, parks. But does a Waco Subway shop require three enormous billboards to alert our attention? Do we really need much more than the modest commercial logos on exit signs to serve our convenience?
And if jobs are an issue — the subject is always broached when citizens try to fight uglification and junkification — why not retrain those billboard crews to build, install and maintain those small, helpful exit signs. Recycle the steel, too.
Every once in a long while, a billboard can be considered a work of art. Fine. The same can be done with murals.
On the other hand, entire valleys can be ruined by a single electronic sign. Entire towns can be soured by junk yards that overwhelm their metal fences. (In both cases, I’m thinking of a stretch of US 71 between Austin and Bastrop.)
On this trip, we saw a billboard advertising a painting of a bucolic scene that covered up an actual bucolic scene; places where pine stands were bulldozed to erect signs directing the driver to businesses named after the Lost Pines; and monster billboards touting natural features along the John M. O’Quinn Scenic Estuarial Corridor.
One statewide billboard company famously pushes Texas pride while simultaneously blocking views of Texas landscapes.
And tell me, why exactly are so many colleges and universities advertising on billboards? Do prospective students really choose their futures based on which institution of higher learning throws up the biggest eyesores?
Many a crusading politician has tried without much luck to minimalize the brutality of billboards, junkyards and retail centers surrounded by acres of unbroken asphalt. But the forces behind these kinds of visually destructive commerce remain powerful and unbending.
Why not require companies to remove aging billboards? They simply repair them, much like plant operators who adjust rather than replace old, polluting facilities.
Punitive taxes? Though they are distracting and therefore can endanger some drivers, billboards will never merit a Texas sin tax.
More plausible are hefty fees and licenses. As Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka rightly points out: Fees, fines, licenses and penalties are not taxes.
“When taxpayers pay the sales tax or tobacco tax or the hotel tax or the school property tax, they get no direct benefit in return,” Burka wrote in a recent story about how to balance the state budget. “Fees and licenses are different. They provide a direct benefit to the person who pays them.”
Outdoor advertisers directly benefit from soiling out collective social spaces. Make ‘em pay. And help balance the budget along the way.
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