Boring Billboards

Carla’s always excellent Spanning the State review on Loaded Orygun calls attention to the Measure 37 claim reported in the Gresham Outlook last Wednesday. Two big billboards, approved under Measure 37, are being built near Highway 26 in Boring. Many comments on the Outlook‘s site, worth reading if only to see how passions still run high on both sides.

Billboard discussions and sign regulations are among my favorite land use issues. Except for safety/distracted driving considerations, people rarely die or are made homeless by decisions on billboards and other signs. Sign restrictions invoke important Constitutional values. Signs and billboards affect everyone – homeowners, renters, and businesspeople. They are in-your-face obvious, making citizens think about personal values on common community space and visual aesthetics in a clearer way that the design of the latest condominium tower. And they allow the potential for both free-market capitalist spending choices and organized citizen activism to make a difference. For example, in SW Portland in the 1990s, third graders at Markham School persuaded the company sponsoring the billboard visible from the school’s play area to stop using it for cigarette ads, and Hayhurst neighborhood volunteers halted the construction of a new billboard by promising to boycott and lobby any advertiser renting its use.

A couple of billboards in Boring highlight the core issue raised by Measure 37, i.e., what is “fair”? Loss of views, as neighbors have found in Lair Hill as the towers rise up in South Waterfront, is shocking and annoying; loss of health through greater traffic congestion when density is allowed in locations without adequate transportation infrastructure is more insidious, but needs to be addressed more urgently. Maybe having a few more billboards to make Oregonians think about what we want, where, will help move along plans for revising land use laws so the billboards aren’t followed by unchecked, unplanned sprawl of subdivisions on farm and forest land all over Oregon.