GUEST COMMENTARY
Reining in billboards across Missouri would preserve state’s beauty
- Paul Lore
- Published The Missourian (Columbia) Apr 16, 2025
We suffer the blight of the ubiquitous billboards that line our highways as a cost of living in a competitive world. But we now suffer “a death by a thousand cuts” from their proliferation. Indeed, Missouri proves fertile ground to plant commercial placards. Interstate 70’s corridor between Kansas City and St. Louis bears a staggering 3.64 billboards per mile, or 2.5 times the rate per mile as compared to the seven states that border Missouri.
Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: “Pollution is not limited to the air we breathe and the water we drink; it can equally offend the eye and ear.” The time has come to rein in the visual pollution created by a crushing number of billboards across our state that offend the eye.
Yet, while we impose reasonable costs and restrictions on power plants and vehicles that emit pollutants, we give outdoor advertisers a free ride along our highways. Individual billboards pay only $100 per year for sign permits to the state — barely enough to cover the administrative costs that supposedly regulate them. Furthermore, billboards do not pay sales taxes on revenues received from the sale of advertising space on their 672-square-foot poster boards that hawk everything and anything except an uncluttered view of our Missouri farms and Ozark hills.
If life imitates art, then legislation imitates money. Our legislators have proven averse to assessing reasonable limits on the number, size, height and lighting of billboards. Worse still, legislators loath assessing reasonable user fees on the billboards that benefit from our roads that carry consumers to them free of charge via our gasoline tax dollars. Compare television and radio advertisers that pay substantial fees for airtime to deliver their ads to consumers’ eyes and ears while roadside commercial advertisers pay next to nothing.
Not surprisingly, the Advertising Association seeks retention of its dominant commercial stream of consciousness over our landscape when Missouri expands and improves I-70 across Missouri’s width. It mulishly objects to review the status quo when Scenic Missouri’s presented a resolution to our legislators requesting that the Scenic Byways Advisory Committee “ … recommend to the Department of Transportation and to the General Assembly strategies to enhance the safety and visual and scenic character of the I-70 corridor through reasonable landscaping, sign control, and highway, bridge, and lighting design standards.” In other words, improve the visual and safety concerns when constructing the new and expanded I-70.
The billboard industry once distributed a glossy brochure titled “Sharing the Great Outdoors with America,” proving that the easiest thing to share is something that belongs to everyone. The association could begin the sharing by working with Scenic Missouri to improve our roadways rather than exerting its financial influence over the legislative process in opposition to basic reforms that benefit the public.
Furthermore, Missouri should assess reasonable user fees on billboards with revenue generated earmarked for the maintenance and enhancement of the green space within the right-of-way and the areas abutting highways, including the costs associated with mowing, planting and removing the accumulating and indestructible plastic trash that litters our roadways. Such revenues would in turn save MoDOT from the right-of-way maintenance costs that it could in turn employ to better maintain and improve our highways for the benefit of all.
Paul Lore, of St. Louis, is an attorney and member of Scenic Missouri.
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