Fighting blight, the Vermont way

Note: This column of mine was published in the Hazleton, Pa., daily five years ago, but its message remains meaningful.

The state of Vermont recently celebrated a major anniversary, and it had nothing to do with the construction of a professional sports arena, subdivision, airport or other land-consuming project.
Vermont, in 1968, said “no” to the placement – anywhere in the Green Mountain State – of new billboards, those oftentimes mammoth placards atop steel posts that scream to passing motorists, urging them to buy this product or that service.
Although several states have followed Vermont’s lead, the Green Mountain State was the first to outlaw billboards and enact a set of stringent rules regulating all kinds of other signage. The 1968 law prohibits privately owned, off-premise signs and restricts the size, height, and distance from roads of said signs. Signs also aren’t allowed to have moving parts or flashing lights. All signs are forbidden on the legal right-of-way. Communities may adopt laws more stringent than the state’s.
Proponents of Vermont’s billboard law point with pride to the state’s scenic, uncluttered roadsides as a key attraction for visitors, especially the thousands-upon-thousands of “leaf-peepers” who visit Vermont to view the bright foliage of autumn. (These same roadsides benefit from the anti-litter campaign launched when the state began requiring sellers of many canned and bottled beverages to pay a 5-cent deposit per container to customers returning them.)
"Whereas, billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising are becoming a matter of increasing concern to many residents . . .”
So began the joint resolution of the Vermont State Assembly in 1967, when it created the Committee to Study Outdoor Advertising, which included future U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords.  It held public hearings, conducted research and reviewed the relevant law on outdoor advertising.
The committee's report, in part, stated: "Our scenic resources . . . have contributed much to our economic development by attracting tourists, . . . residents, and new industries and cultural facilities. . . .[T]he scattering of outdoor advertising throughout the state is detrimental to the preservation of these resources, and consequently to the economic base of the state."
So, in the following year, Vermont prohibited new billboards and provided an amortization period of five years to remove existing billboards.  By 1974, Vermont had felled its last billboard.
In 1997, the state commissioned an independent study of outdoor advertising to review the success of the billboard ban and to assess other forms of advertising.  Public opinion polls and studies echoed the 1967 report.  The study stated that traveler information solutions must maintain Vermont's quality environment, continue to prohibit billboards, and prevent sign clutter.
Businesses still receive the state government’s help through the posting of small chest-high signs devoid of accouterments which simply identify its name and travel distance.

Some Googling turned up choice statements like this one attributed to former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm: "Billboards contribute a minuscule amount to our economic well-being, but they impose a high cost.  They detract from Colorado's attractiveness to tourists and from the pleasant surroundings for our residents."

At the municipal level, more than 700 communities nationwide prohibit the construction of new billboards.  Why? Because billboard control improves community character and quality of life – both of which directly impact local economies. In fact, despite billboard industry claims to the contrary, communities and states that enact tough billboard controls have actually enjoyed strong economic growth (the current recission aside).

While some signs are necessary to provide directions to travelers, most billboards merely contribute to visual clutter – also known as “blight.”  For example, on one section of road in Hampton, Va. (and I have driven this very stretch), there were so many signs that a driver going 45 miles per hour would need to read 1,363 words per minutes just to understand all the information.  That is five times the normal reading speed of a stationary person.

The billboard industry often claims that controlling outdoor advertising will, over time, create economic ghost towns.  In fact, the undeniable aesthetic improvements to a community that come from controlling billboards actually helps its economy, notes Scenic America, a non-profit organization founded, in part, on the strength of Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America’s roadsides.

Billboards are both a symptom and cause of urban blight. And the presence of fewer signs actually signals a community’s economic health.

Mull this tidbit from Scenic America: Communities can thrive without billboards, because most billboards have no connection to the local economy.  They advertise either national brands or out-of-state products and services . . . Billboard industry naysayers claim that businesses such as gas stations and eating and drinking establishments would be financially hurt by reducing or eliminating their outdoor ads.  On the contrary, in cities and towns such as Williamsburg, Va., Raleigh, N.C., and Houston the period following implementation of stricter billboard controls and/or bans on new billboard construction was marked by steady growth of sales in those industries.

Consider what happened in Raleigh: Sales for eating and drinking establishments rose from $243 million in 1989, before billboard control, to $307 million in 1992, after controls were introduced, a rise of about 20 percent.

Billboard control is especially key for communities that depend on tourism.  According to the Travel Industry Association of America, travelers spent $541 billion nationwide in 1999.  The President's Commission on Americans Outdoors reported that “natural beauty” was the most important criteria for adults choosing a site for outdoor recreation.  “The more a community does to enhance its unique natural, scenic, historic, and architectural assets, the more tourists it attracts.”

Back to the scenic vistas of Vermont: When the Green Mountain State took down its last billboard in 1975, the state’s tourism revenues increased by more than 50 percent in the following three years. The president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce noted at the time: "Although there was some initial sensitivity that removing billboards might hurt tourism, it has had the opposite effect.  Tourism is up for all businesses large and small."

Many prime tourist nations prohibit new billboard construction even as their tourism revenues keep rising. The long list includes Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, N.C.; South Padre Island, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Aspen and Boulder, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon.

Vermont is hardly alone at banning billboards statewide. The others include Hawaii and Maine and each continues drawing people from around the world to view their scenic wonders.

Remember these lessons from elsewhere the next time you’re motoring along a well-traveled Pennsylvania highway.

Roads and the future of wildlife

This is a fresh newspaper column from me

Almost from the moment in 1988 when my late wife and I moved to Conyngham from the Air Force base at Plattsburgh, N.Y., I began keeping track of roadkill – the native wildlife species I came across while hiking and fitness-walking on the many rural roads surrounding the borough in both Sugarloaf and Butler townships.

The list-keeping has continued ever since and also includes roadkills found in other states, both East and West. Most of the species I annotated in field notebooks (I’m now in my fourth volume) were, however, found on Pennsylvania roads. That’s simply a matter of having spent more time exploring, hiking, walking and cycling in Pennsylvania than elsewhere.

It takes very little to stir my memories of those journeys on foot. It happened again this week as I scanned through my photo library, coming across images of dead wildlife from those years.

There, see those eyes? I wonder what that Eastern Cottontail (that’s the official name for a creature most folks label a “rabbit”) would say if it had a chance? The photo, snapped with a first-generation digital camera on West County Road in Sugarloaf, shows the cottontail on the asphalt ribbon’s shoulder, its dark eyes staring upward, frozen in time.

Most roadkill, whether found on Butler Drive in Conyngham or on any other road, amounts to a carcass flattened almost to the point of making species identification difficult. But not this cottontail.

Even making a good guess at the roadkill data in Pennsylvania, or any other state, is hard-to-impossible as even keeping track of the dead of one species – the white-tailed deer – is tricky and time consumptive.

One thing for sure, though. Pennsylvania has to be the dead white-tailed deer champion throughout the species’ wide range. There are several factors at play in that estimation. From the ecological side is this: Pennsylvania has a lot of edge habitat; edge habitat favors habitat generalists, like the white-tail and raccoons, squirrels, opossums, skunks and more. And just like in other eastern states, Pennsylvania keeps on creating even more edge habitat (e.e., the zone between one habitat type (forest) and another (the shoulder of a road). Our society’s zeal for sprawl development and our reliance on the private automobile (the machine that made sprawl happen) mean even more edge habitat and more deer.

My field notebooks tell me this: I’ve now tallied the roadkill dead of 157 animal species, from bumblebees and green darners up to sapsuckers, screech owls, Canada goose, and on and on and on. My overall tally (and, again, most of those numbers were tallied in Pennsylvania) is, surely, quite conservative in scope.

If we were ever able to put together an entire team of naturalists to go out and, say, over a 24-hour period, keep track of every roadkill species found, the final tally would be much higher than what my own field notes reflect.

The solution?

Walk, not drive your car, when you can. Live in already established neighborhoods. Tell your borough council or township supers you do not like the idea of more sprawl development.

And tell them you want our community to be as friendly as it can be toward bicyclists and walkers – forms of transportation that keep practitioners slim, fight obesity, and burn calories, not fossil fuels.

And which save wildlife – our natural heritage.

Look carefully at the accompanying photo of an Eastern Cottontail: What do those eyes tell you?

This is ground zero among the local greenhouse gas factories. I watched this traffic debacle yesterday at the vaunted 5 Corners intersection in the village of Essex Junction, Vt. It takes several minutes of watching to find an automobile that has more than one person in it. And that means this: There is no carpooling or ride-sharing. The personal motor vee

hikle still rules the roost, I mean the highway.

Crude oil and New York State's capital city

The neanderthal U.S. petroleum biz keeps on trucking, even if it is by rail more than tractor-trailer and tanker. And most folks forget this little fact: It takes burning the fossil fuel to get the tanker full of fossil fueld to the marketplace where other people then burn fossil fuel in order to buy more fossil fuel. Fossil fuel = greenhouse gas. Duh. Read about the ongoing debacle of America's new energy transportation network.

Vermont government and cleaning up Lake Champlain

Gov.Peter Shumlin can start by asking counties and municipalities within them to stop the clearing of forests and the subsequent conversion of that land to crap like parking lots, driveways and even lawns, all of which contribute a hell of a lot of nutrient pollution to Lake Champlain via its tributaries (Winooski River, Otter Creek, Mississquoi River, Lamoille River, etc.). Then, having declared that water quality means more than a developer's bankroll, we can all start restoring the natural landscape - the landscape that's critical toward filtering surface waters and, ultimately, to cleaning up the big lake's water. So, come on,folks. Let's get going on this. Here's Vermont Public Radio's take on the governor and the lake.

New York DOT chief throws cold water on 'Rooftop Highway'

What this article does not mention is this: Roads fragment, degrade and destroy fish and wildlife habitat. And a read of the piece from North Country Public Radio includes the same tired argument conservationists have been hearing for decades: New roads/bigger roads foster economic development. Good quality-of-life demands open space and Wild Nature, not yet another polluting eyesore.

Forever Wild in NY's Adirondack Park? May be, but . . .

This is a lengthy op-ed but a good read that punctures the whole of a proposed amendment to the New York Constitution helping a private concern (a mining company) at the public's expense (the Forever Wild law). Protect the Adirondacks! is one the mark with its case against the terrible precedent this amendment would create. Read about it here. I can think of many, many case studies that say no to this kind of land-abusing "resource" happy mining: The anthracite coal region of northeastern Pa., the Berkeley Pit copper mine at Anaconda, Mont., phosphate mines in southeastern Idaho, and more.

Study finds north-central U.S. a big crude oil region

So, let's crap it up with drill rigs, roads, tankers, sprawl housing, noise pollution, oil spills, toxic waste dumps, etc. And, now is the time! Here's reporting on the untapped petroleum bonanza.

Federal and state/private forests and money (greed)

This is a nice column from the Idaho Statesman's Rocky Barker. But, Rocky, why no mention of the phrase "ecological services?" Yes, you mention fish and wildlife habitat, erosion, roadless vs. roaded, etc., but the great big public still needs to hear about ecological services. Oh, and roaded forest lands always have a much, much larger carbon footprint than roadless land. And which is healthier for wildlfife? Simple. Roadless.