Freeway Billboards Opposed
Site of proposed billboard along Interstate 238 South (eastbound) in Ashland and Cherryland, just before East 14th Street and Interstate 580.
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors has delayed approving an electronic billboard along Interstate 238 near East 14th Street after a citizen’s group charged that the proposed billboard violates federal, state, and local laws.
The county had proposed relocating some traditional billboards from local streets to a smaller number of electronic billboards along freeways, something it says is legal. There is already an electronic billboard in Castro Valley near the Grove Way entrance to Interstate 580 eastbound and on Interstate 880 near the A Street entrance northbound.
The Alameda County Taxpayers Association (ACTA), in a December 11 letter written by attorney Jason Bevis, cites several sections of the California Outdoor Advertising Act and other laws barring billboards in a designated “scenic corridor” section of a highway, excessive height, relocating a billboard to residential land, aesthetics, and safety.
The ACTA also questioned a deal in which the county splits revenues received for the billboards, for the life of a 30-year contract, with an outside “billboard consultant.”
The project had earlier been opposed, last August 19, by the Eden Area Municipal Advisory Council, which advises the supervisors on local issues in Cherryland, Ashland, and San Lorenzo.
Senior Planner Damien Curry with the county’s Community Development Agency said the proposed billboard is legal and not along a scenic corridor. It has been approved as legal by Caltrans, he said, and approved by the county Planning Commission and, in an earlier form, by the Board of Supervisors.
He also said Eden MAC had initially accepted the proposal and had suggested some modifications.
“Putting some billboards along a freeway hardly mitigates the harm done by dividing the community with a freeway in the first place.”
Eden MAC chair Tyler Dragoni said that the group, founded in 2019, was presented with the proposal at its first meeting as something that had already been approved. They at first focused on making it less intrusive, he said.
But they gradually turned to oppose it outright, according to Dragoni.
“There are a lot of protective laws in California,” he said MAC members had soon realized.
They were helped in this realization by the efforts of the ACTA and its attorney Bevis, whom Dragoni said was the first attorney in decades to take an interest in the well-being of the Eden area.
“We’re a disadvantaged community that the county drags all its undesirable things into,” Dragonia said. “Project after project degrades, not uplifts, the community.”
“Putting some billboards along a freeway hardly mitigates the harm done by dividing the community with a freeway in the first place,” he added.
What the MAC would like, said Dragoni, is for the county to do what the city of Hayward did when it redesigned Foothill Boulevard a few years ago The city bought up the billboards along the road, then tore them down.
That, the county’s Curry said, would be prohibitively expensive. This way, the community gets rid of billboards along its streets and gets fewer in return.
He also points to the county's substantial revenues from outdoor advertising companies, which help fund community projects in the unincorporated areas.
He says that while rapidly flashing billboards could distract drivers, the county’s rules let images change only once every eight seconds.
That’s not good enough for Dragoni, though, who says the point of the billboard is to make drivers take their eyes off the road.
“You'd think the Supervisors would be a bit more attuned to the issue of distracted drivers so soon after a distracted driver killed one of their colleagues, Wilma Chan,” he said.