Legislature may boost billboard height cap to 60 feet

Texas’ tallest billboards soon might become the standard and not the exception under a proposed change to make 60-foot-tall signs permissible along state highways.

Beautification advocates called the new rules a compromise in the quickly concluding legislative session that left them with a choice of fighting for strict rules or having no rules at all.

“It is not ideal for Texas, but we felt at this point in the session it was the best compromise we can make,” said Margaret Lloyd, president of Scenic Texas. “We were looking at no limit and that would be a huge step backward.”

The ramifications of the change are difficult to assess, advocates and state officials said. Advertisements are replaced regularly, but the poles and scaffolds that hold them can last decades. Though they can be lengthened, it is a costly process, so it is unlikely sign companies will rush out to raise the 20,000 signs along state highways, officials said.

Many do not need to be elevated to meet the new standards anyway, as thousands of billboards

dotting Texas highways already exceed the existing 42.5-foot limit. Though officials with the Texas Department of Transportation told lawmakers in 2017 when they first tried to finesse the rules that there were 159 billboards involved in disputes between the owner and TxDOT over height, the actual number of billboards taller than 42.5 feet is 8,600 — 43 percent of all the highway signs in the state.

“From a visual standpoint, I do not think travelers are going to notice a difference,” Lloyd said.

The proposed rules, brokered in the last 10 days by state Rep. Terry Canales, DEdinburg, chairman of the Texas House Transportation Committee, would increase the limit enacted in 1986. The proposal is outlined in SB 357, authored by state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville.

The bill passed the Senate with a 42.5-foot limit, was changed in the House to a 60-foot maximum and now returns to the Senate, where senators can agree to the change or send the bill to a conference committee.

Canales, Nichols and state Sen. Kirk Watson, DAustin, who also fought for the sign rules, all declined comment on the changes this week, citing a flurry of legislative activity.

The regulations would apply only to billboards and signs along state-maintained roads outside municipalities that have their own rules, such as Houston.

For the past three sessions, sign height has been a headache for lawmakers. Eight years ago, TxDOT obtained equipment to quickly and accurately measure billboard heights and began issuing enforcement letters to sign owners. That led to numerous court challenges between sign companies and TxDOT, agency officials said.

Separately, the state’s right to regulate political signs led a court to toss most of the rules related to commercial and political signs, which lawmakers scrambled to replace in 2017.

Tweaking the language and re-establishing some of the rules has proven tough, however.

In 2017, lawmakers opted for what some considered a compromise that allowed all signs that, for various reasons — including simply ignoring the rules — were higher than 42.5 feet when measured from the roadway. That height had been the de facto limit for all billboards except those installed before 1986.

About 4,700 signs still standing predate any sign rules, TxDOT officials said. About 1,000 of those stand in excess of 42.5 feet tall.

Thousands more were built after the height rules went into effect but still exceeded the limits. Activists say a lack of enforcement by TxDOT district offices led to a proliferation of signs reaching as high as 85 feet.

Reining in the rules two years ago to give regulators clear rules and sign companies a pass on prior transgressions, however, tied the issue in knots. The Texas Transportation Commission, which oversees rules for signs along state highways, balked at some of the specifics of the bill.

Calling some of the instructions vague, the commission opted to allow signs up to 85 feet, double the current standard and tall enough to bring all the non-compliant billboards into conformity.

Lawmakers and highway beautification advocates bristled, saying that proposal opened the entire state to towering billboards. The irony was not lost on those who noted that the Lone Star State was the starting point for highway beautification efforts led by Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady of both Texas and the United States.

“I do not know why the commission wants to have as its legacy the doubling of the heights, but so be it,” Nichols said on the Senate floor earlier this month.

The current bill is intended to remove all ambiguity before the commission’s interpretation of the rules would kick in Sept. 1.

Meanwhile, TxDOT and sign owners continue to spar in court. Since March

2017, when the Legislature reiterated the 42.5-foot limit for all new signs, five new billboards have been erected that exceed that

height.

“One of the five lowered their sign to regulation height of 42.5’,” TxDOT spokeswoman Veronica Beyer said in an email. “The other four signs exceeding the regulation height of 42.5’ are in litigation and still remain at this time. The sign owners are afforded due process to appeal our enforcement action.”

Those cases, including one about a billboard erected in a stand of trees along U.S. 290 near Cypress, would be moot under the proposed rules because none of the signs exceeds 60 feet in height.

If there is a silver lining to a taller limit, Lloyd said it is that advocates and sign companies came to agreement and TxDOT has the manpower and the legislature’s support.

“I am a lot more confident that TxDOT is going to enforce in the future more than I have been in the past,” she said.