DURHAM — Lobbying groups for the state’s cities and counties have joined forces to oppose an N.C. Senate bill that would override laws in Durham and other places that bar digital billboards along major roads.
The opposition includes the N.C. League of Municipalities, the N.C. Association of County Commissioners, the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, Preservation North Carolina and the state chapter of the American Planning Association.
Also involved is Durham’s Inter-Neighborhood Council, said Ben Hitchings, past legislative chair of the planning association’s state chapter.
The groups “will be reaching out to legislators and asking them to protect the right of citizens to make their own decisions about community appearance,” said Hitchings, who’s also the planning director in Morrisville.
The Senate bill is “an intrusion on the rights of local governments to establish how they want
The bill, introduced Wednesday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Brown, D-Onslow, would give billboard companies like Fairway Outdoor Advertising expanded rights to clear vegetation on the sites of their displays.
But the bill’s key provision also allows them to install “automatic changeable facing” billboards, no matter any local laws to the contrary.
Bell and other Durham City Council members only months ago unanimously rejected Fairway’s request for a local ordinance that would allow it to replace some of its existing billboards with digital models.
The August decision had widespread support. Hundreds of people wrote e-mails to the council opposing Fairway’s request, and a poll commissioned by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau found that 72 percent of residents surveyed favored retaining the local law that prevents the upgrades.
Fairway officials dropped a parallel request to the county for an ordinance change before County Commissioners could vote on it.
But last month they acknowledged that working through a trade group, the N.C. Outdoor Advertising Association, they would try to renew the debate in the General Assembly.
There, their complaints fell on receptive ears — among them some apparently eager to bring Durham’s government to heel.
“Durham has done a lot of unusual things, like allowing the Mexican consulate to distribute things for licenses,” said state Sen. Bob Rucho, R-Mecklenburg. “They go at a little different drummer’s beat than the rest of the state because no one’s put a challenge to them.”
Rucho, one of the senators co-sponsoring the bill with Brown, was alluding to a separate controversy over the City Council’s decision to support the Durham Police Department’s practice of accepting the Mexican government’s matricula consular as valid ID.
GOP representatives in the N.C. House are pushing a bill to override that decision as well.
Rucho said he’s supporting the bill because he believes local governments that don’t like billboards should have to pay to remove them, instead of using their zoning powers to put pressure on billboard companies to take them down.
The zoning route is “a way of trying to destroy something without paying for it,” he said.
Durham’s senior state legislator, Rep. Mickey Michaux, a Democrat, warned city officials earlier this year that the new GOP-led majorities in the House and Senate would be automatically hostile to “anything that comes out of Durham and Chapel Hill.”
The two communities are both Democratic Party strongholds.
In Durham County, the registered countywide electorate is 61 percent Democratic; within the city, 63 percent of registered voters are Democrats.
The GOP’s willingness to involve the General Assembly in local disputes drew criticism earlier in the week from House Minority Leader Joe Hackney, D-Orange. He said the new majority has proven itself easily distracted from its professed desire to focus on improving the economy.
“Guns, pelvic politics, marriage, taking away local control, all that has come to dominate this session, not jobs,” Hackney said.
