Visual Pollution Update
With encouragement from San Francisco Beautiful, the governor signed legislation in 2010 allowing municipalities to outlaw mobile billboards. We look forward to working with the new Board of Supervisors to craft the local implementing legislation. And as agencies throughout the region, including BART and San Francisco International Airport, are searching for new revenue sources, we are reminding them that billboard proliferation is not acceptable to Bay Area voters.
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Nov 3rd 2009
VICTORY
Prop D Defeated
No New Billboards |
The privately crafted, pro-billboard measure, Prop D, was decisively defeated at the polls in 2009 (54% voted no). The commonsense values of ordinary San Franciscans prevail as we reaffirm our civic pride and sense of place as a world-class city.
San Francisco Beautiful, which led the opposition to Prop D, has consistently held that new blight will only add to existing blight. The effects of digital billboards along Mid-Market Street would offset any of the purported community benefits of Proposition D.
The initiative failed despite the impressive endorsements received early in the campaign as well as having outspent opponents 20 to one.
To many public policy observers, the "D" in Prop D might as well stand for "desperation" -- desperation to confront problems that have plagued Mid-Market Street for decades. Voters are telling our elected officials they won't settle for short-sighted, symbolic solutions to very real problems facing Mid-Market area and our city as a whole.
Likewise, Proposition E passed in 2009 by a wide margin (57 to 43), thus prohibiting any additional advertising on public property. San Francisco Beautiful had been the prime supporter of this initiative.
In 2009, San Francisco voters remove all doubt - they will tolerate no new billboards. San Francisco Beautiful will continue to articulate that mandate. Maybe City Hall will finally hear the message: No New Billboards.
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San Francisco Beautiful board members Chris Charles and Byron Rodriguez watch from an iPhone as votes come in. |
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Chandra Friese and San Francisco Beautiful board members Peter Fortune, Milo Hanke, Bob Friese and Juan Monsanto celebrate the election night win. |
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Tom Radulovich, Executive Director of
Livable City, (center) listens to victory speeches with members of the Leaugue of Young Voters. |
Image by Scott Grabowski
In 2002, 79.1% of the voters approved Proposition G, the measure prohibiting new general advertising on private property. Today, voters are being asked to make an exception to the “No New Billboards” law they had passed resoundingly. The benefits of a possible exception are highly speculative.
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