North Carolina advertisers are being allowed to cut more trees on
state property than ever before, say critics of a North Carolina law
that went into effect early this year.
The law expands the area around billboards that can be cleaned of
vegetation, and allows advertisers to ignore local ordinances, which has
sparked a heated debate about the relative value of trees and
billboards to the state.
Now the N.C. Department of Transportation, after using temporary
rules since March, has proposed a set of permanent rules to guide them
in their selective vegetation removal policy in compliance with the law.
Ryke Longest, director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy
Clinic, said in an interview that the biggest problem is no one has
really examined how much state property is being given away in enacting
these rules.
“That’s the public’s property,” Longest said, “and we’re giving it away.”
When a company clears vegetation around a billboard, they must
compensate the state by replanting trees elsewhere, taking down two
other billboards, or by simply buying the trees from the state, Jamille
Robbins, public involvement officer at the N.C. Department of
Transportation, said in an email interview.
The price per tree is 75 dollars per caliper inch, said Longest, who
speaks on behalf of non-profit environmental organization Scenic NC.
“There’s no way that comes close to the replacement value of the tree;
there’s a discount,” he said.
Longest said that the billboard companies do the measurements
themselves, so there’s an opportunity for them to pretend certain trees
don’t exist.
At one site, Longest said, “They cut 53 trees, but they told the
state that one of them was existing, and so they paid $1,700 for the
one.” The other 52 would’ve cost $34,000 to cut, he said.
“Buy one existing tree, get 52 free,” Longest said. “That’s just a ridiculous subsidy.”
Alyson Tamer, roadside environmental engineer for the N.C. Department
of Transportation, said that advertisers only have to pay “for trees
that were existing at the time the billboard was put up.”
Tamer said that advertisers don’t get a chance to lie about tree
numbers. “The companies definitely measure, and they say whether there’s
existing trees or not, but our technicians go out there and verify
everything,” she said in an interview.
Tony Adams, executive director of the N.C. Outdoor Advertising
Association, defended the law and the new proposed policies, saying that
billboards are more important than trees for North Carolina.
There were
very few trees on the public right-of-way before the 1970s, he said. “I
will contend to you that many places in North Carolina were prettier
back then,” he said at a public hearing in Asheville.
Billboards play an important role in leading visitors to cultural
landmarks, Adams said, and people should be concerned about visibility
instead of trees.
Adams said that trees are also worse for the environment than
billboards because they give off methane and deplete groundwater. “But
isn’t it interesting that when there were less trees in the public
right-of-way 30 or 40 years ago, global warming was less of a problem
than it is today?”
Adams cited studies done by the Max Planck Institute in West Germany
to support his statements. “So if you’re willing to look at it
objectively, you can see where trees have positive influences on the
environment, but there are negative influences also,” he said.
Trees by the side of the road can be dangerous to motorists, and
advertisers are doing North Carolina a service by paying for their
removal, Adams said. “That could be somebody’s grandfather, and when
those people get killed, they should not have to give their lives
because a tree was too close to the road.”
The N.C. Department of Transportation’s new policies do include some
improvements, Longest said. The policy now recognizes the importance of
state and federal environmental laws, which the law alone didn’t, but it
still doesn’t respect local ordinances, he said.
The new policies also allow a 30-day period for individual
municipalities to review vegetation removal proposals and make comments
before the N.C. Department of Transportation looks at it, Longest said,
“but the state is not obligated to deny it based on that.
“That’s the piece of it that I think is really missing,” Longest
said. “It’s not like when you cross that line from private property onto
state right-of-way that local ordinances don’t apply—they do in every
other circumstance.”
The Rules and Review Commission of the the North Carolina Office of
Administrative Hearings will meet on Oct. 18 to determine whether or not
the proposed policies conform to state law.
http://campusblueprint.com/2012/10/13/north-carolina-trees-sacrificed-for-billboard-visibility/
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