Tennessee’s General Assembly has started considering changes to Tennessee’s billboard-control law because federal courts have ruled the law unconstitutional. The motivation to enact a new billboard law is to remedy a pending legal challenge regarding free speech (Thomas v. Bright).
Similar constitutional challenges to billboard law arose in Oregon and Texas, pointing to the different regulation of on-premise and off-premise signs. Oregon and Texas revised their billboard laws, resolving the legal challenges there.
In Tennessee — to prepare for the 2020 legislative session — the Outdoor Advertising Association of Tennessee convened on January 27 in Nashville. Its members then met with state lawmakers and staff the next day.
On January 29, committees of Tennessee’s House and Senate heard testimony from the billboard industry, the State, and Scenic Tennessee.
You can watch the January 29, 2020 Senate Transportation and Safety Committee hearing here. Some highlights from the hearing.
Brian Carroll, Legislative Director and Legal Counsel, TDOT
The billboard act in its present form is unconstitutional. We felt the only option that left TDOT is to stop issuing or processing applications for outdoor advertising permits and to stop administering any regulatory functions of the act until we have a new order…or until the General Assembly enacts revisions to the Act…we still have a lot of work to do…
John Reinbold, General Counsel, TDOT
We’re going to have to figure out a different way of defining what an on-premise sign is that does not need to be regulated versus these off-premise or commercial signs that would be regulated.
Kerry Yoakum, VP Government Affairs, OAAA
In Tennessee we contribute about $1.1 million in government taxes and $16.2 million in lease payments to 4,000 Tennessee landowners…approximately 11,000 businesses use billboards…what we are seeking is to have a regulated industry and we need to act quick….Today you have some language that the industry is advancing which does not contain the labels on-premise/off-premise which were found offensive by the Sixth Circuit. You have something that resembles Texas…we would ask that you pass this legislation…all the stakeholders, the outdoor industry, Scenic Tennessee, the Tennessee DOT and Federal Highway support reasonable regulation.
Marge Davis, President, Scenic Tennessee
We feel strongly that now is not the year or the time to press for new changes…we just need to get back to regulated status…we would like to see more regulation of billboards. We would like to see fewer of them. We wouldn’t mind, frankly, going all the way to zero…but we want to be reasonable. We don’t want to go backwards.
Senate Transportation and Safety Committee Chairman Becky Massey on pending legislation:
Chairman Howell and I have been actively working with all parties to try to get to a solution and looking through all points of this and I’m sure we will have some legislation before this committee shortly.
You can watch the January 29, 2020 House Infrastructure Subcommittee hearing here. Some Highlights.
Rep. Dan Howell, Chairman, House Transportation Committee, on the need for urgency.
We’ve got to fix this. We have an unregulated industry…I’m told that we’ve had at least 50 billboards spring up across the state since this has been declared unconstitutional……
When I mentioned the 50 billboards. These are what I would consider bad actors. These are not people in the normal business of putting up billboards. They want to comply with the law and they are not going to go out and violate the law now.
We’ve summarized the problem here today…we all want to fix this…I appreciate the cooperation from TDOT and the industry…they have been working diligently to provide some language and compromised on some things in several areas. I’m anxious to move this legislation forward. My counterpart in the Senate is as well. If we don’t then this time next year we’re going to have 50 more billboards that have sprung up from bad actors and I don’t want to see that happen.
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