The City Council’s Blueprint Denver committee on Wednesday initially approved a ban on new LED billboards, along with minor changes and clarifications to the ordinance governing outdoor advertising.
The full City Council must take up the issue.
Denver has three LED billboards, at East Hampden Avenue and South Monaco Street, South Colorado Boulevard and East Mexico Avenue and to the south of the West Sixth Avenue viaduct west of Interstate 25. Other brightly lit signs, like the one on The Denver Post building at Colfax Avenue and Broadway, were allowed under separate zoning codes.
There are 550 billboards in Denver; roughly 150 do not conform to code.
The city has a cap on the total square footage of all billboards, which is divided among the 550 existing signs.
Under the rules passed Wednesday, all would require a permit from the city’s zoning office. As nonconforming billboards, many of which are along East Colfax, are either changed or their leases end, they will be denied new permits and ordered removed.
The committee also got into a discussion on whether newcomers are locked out of Denver’s outdoor advertising market.
Attorney Ron Fano, representing United Advertising Corp., which had 12 signs in Denver that it sold to Lamar Co. and now would like to re-enter the Denver market, told council members his client has been trying to get the city to allow newcomers for more than a year.
He used the example of a property owner who leases space for a billboard.
“When the lease expires, that property owner should be allowed to shop the lease to other billboard companies and go with the best lease instead of triggering the removal clause,” he said.
But the city’s zoning regulations contain a “removal clause” that allows the leaseholder — not the sign owner — to retain credit for the advertising square footage it occupied. To move the square footage elsewhere, the structure must come down. “That trigger prevents any new company from entering the market,” Fano said. “That’s bad public policy for property owners.”
But attorney Steve Richard, representing Mile High Outdoor, disagreed, saying there have been plenty of new signs in the city, such as bus stop ads, benches and advertising in the theater district.
Zoning administrator Michael O’Flaherty said the city is in litigation over 11 billboards, primarily because the existing code governing outdoor advertising is confusing and vague.
Currently, signs are allowed only in industrial, B-4 and B-8 zones. East Colfax is now under Main Street, or MS, zoning which prohibits new billboards.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
