Millions on the line in ‘I Love NY’ spat
ALBANY, New York — The big, blue “I Love NY” signs lined up in groups of five along New York state highways and roads are hard to miss. And that, say federal transportation officials, is the problem.
The 500-plus tourism signs the state has installed from Long Island to Buffalo are at the center of a yearslong standoff between the Federal Highway Administration and Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo.
The agency says the signs don’t meet regulations and pose a potential distraction to drivers, and it has demanded that the state remove them by Sept 30 or lose $14 million in funding.
New York’s transportation department, however, has said the signs don’t pose a risk and there’s no evidence they’ve directly contributed to accidents.
Despite Cuomo’s assurances that the tourism campaign had run its course and the signs would be dismantled by the start of the summer vacation season, no signs have been removed. And the ongoing saga has provided plenty of fuel for the governor’s critics.
“If the governor had put his ego aside, adhered to federal highway rules and found some way to compromise before he disregarded the law, we could have avoided this embarrassing debacle,” said state Assemblyman Joseph Errigo, a Republican from western New York.
New York newspaper editorial pages have also blasted the signs, with Newsday calling them “useless eyesores” that “seem to pop up with brutal regularity”.
While the “I Love NY” logo (with “Love” depicted as a heart symbol) has been around
signs
for decades, Cuomo launched the initiative to put it on highway signs in 2013 as part of a campaign to boost the state’s $100 billion tourism industry.
The $8 million plan called for erecting 514 signs with each one bearing the state tourism office’s internet site iloveny.com and a promotion for the “I Love NY” app.
Many of the signs are posted along the 917-kilometer, state-run New York Thruway system.
Cuomo, considered a possible candidate for president in 2020, considers the signs a key component in spurring the state’s tourism industry, which the administration says attracted nearly 244 million visitors in 2017, a 4 percent increase over the previous year.
State officials have been vague about the signs’ fate but said this past week that they “fully expect to have a mutually beneficial agreement in place well before the September deadline”.
According to Nancy Grugle, a Colorado-based driving expert, an in-depth analysis of the signs would have to be conducted in order to determine whether they’re a distraction to drivers. But she’s concerned that including a website address and the name of an app may entice some drivers to reach for their cellphones.