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Residents across North Carolina are fighting against a bill that would essentially allow for more billboards.
Senate Bill 183 and House Bill 309 would allow existing billboards to become digital, and those digital billboards could be placed every 1,500 feet on interstates or other commercial roadways.
“We don’t need more of them. Actually we need to do away with them if we could,” said Sherman Simmons, owner of Platinum Auto Detailing, which has a billboard that blocks his business.
The bills would also allow more trees to be cleared away from the signs. Any local billboard regulations would be overridden by the bill as well.
“We think that the local neighborhood needs to have a say in what is going to happen,” said George Bryan with the Winston-Salem Neighborhood Association.
The group, which represents 25 neighborhoods in the city, has joined neighborhood associations in Asheville, Durham and Wilmington in a fight against the bill.
“To give multinational corporations the choice of whether they want to cut trees down that are buffering the sides of highways and neighborhoods isn’t a choice they should have,” Bryan said.
Proponents of the bill said people owning the land for the signs should be able to do what they want, like most private property landowners.
The bill is still in the committee phase. |
