PennDOT takes control of Philly's outdoor ads in commercial zones

JUST TWO WEEKS after Philadelphia City Council passed laws allowing "Urban Experiential Displays" with full-motion 3-D video ads in Center City, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation canceled the city's four-decade-long authority to regulate outdoor advertising in certain areas.

In a letter dated April 13, Leslie Richards, acting secretary of transportation, wrote to the Federal Highway Administration that the certification granted to the city in 1974 "to establish and enforce regulations with respect to size, lighting and spacing of outdoor advertising devices in zoned commercial and industrial areas has been canceled."

Exempted from the cancellation was the Market Street East Advertising District, including the signage now atop the old Lit Brothers building at 8th and Market, for which certification "will remain in place pending further review and approval" from the federal agency, the letter said.

Richards wrote the letter to Renee Sigel, the agency's division administrator for Pennsylvania.

The letter was sent shortly after Council passed bills permitting 6-story-high, 35,000-square-foot digital displays, which have not yet been erected anywhere in the city. PennDOT said the timing was coincidental.

"It was not the direct cause of the cancellation," PennDOT spokeswoman Erin Waters-Trasatt said yesterday in an email to the Daily News.

"We've been working with the Federal Highway Administration and the city on this issue [billboard regulation] for a few years, and we have decided that the outdoor advertising control would be most effectively managed through PennDOT's permitting resources," she wrote.

Waters-Trasatt added: "UEDs are advertising devices that will need to be approved by PennDOT before being erected along highways designated as part of the National Highway System."

Mary C. Tracy, executive director of Scenic Philadelphia, the organization that has been fighting what Tracy calls billboard "blight and clutter" for 25 years, said she was "thrilled" about the letter.

"You have a City Council that's really billboard-crazy, and you have a Law Department that is working more for the billboard companies than they are for citizens of the city, " she said.

Tracy pointed to a settlement agreement under former Mayor John Street that allowed noncomplying billboards to stay up for eight years.

She said the city had initiated a $650-per-billboard annual fee, but under the agreement the city reduced the fee to $50 per sign.

Andrew Ross, chief deputy solicitor, disputed Tracy's assessment that the Law Department has helped ad firms "do whatever they want."

"We're not trying to make it easy for more billboards to come in," Ross said. "We would like to see some of them go away."

In another bill that Council passed recently, Ross said, the Law Department tried to force ad companies to remove four older billboards for each digital billboard allowed. Instead, the bill has a 2-to-1 exchange.

Ross said the city defended issuing permits to convert a billboard at 11th and Vine streets to digital because the original sign was legal. The matter is now before Commonwealth Court.

"UEDs, these are not old-school billboards," said Carl Primavera, a lawyer who helped Catalyst Outdoor Advertising push the UED bill through Council. Catalyst wants to put up 3-D structures at Broad and Race streets; near the Pennsylvania Convention Center; and at 12th and Arch, near Reading Terminal Market.

"PennDOT would not exercise jurisdiction on a whole host of things we have in town," he said.

PennDOT may lose 10 percent of its federal highway funds if it does not bring the billboards under control, especially flashing digital signs, which Tracy said are a distraction to motorists.

Tracy said that after her group won court cases that found billboards like those in FDR Park in South Philadelphia illegal, the city has not bothered to take the signs down.

"People get used to ugliness," she said.