Digital Billboards Under Fire

First it was Republican "Bluenose Mike" Ritz who, as Director of the Memphis/Shelby County Office of Planning and Development, wanted to make his name by devastating the outdoor sign industry to make Memphis as insipid as Germantown.

Now it's more officials with a residential development uber alles mentality, like City Council member Reid Hedgepeth and some bureaucrat named Mary Baker, who want to debilitate the new and wonderful digital signage made possible by twenty-first century technology.

As reported by Andy Meek in the Memphis Daily News:

New rules that are part of the amendments approved by the LUCB this month include that the entire area of signs may not exceed 672 square feet. There generally must be 2,000 feet between whatever electronic signs ultimately get built.

On-premise signs that have electronic elements cannot have more than 200 square feet of a sign featuring the digital component.
. . . .
Hedgepeth, a developer and former member of the LUCB, said he recently had driven by one of the projects approved by the LUCB a couple of years ago.

It was the Value Place extended stay hotel off Riverdale Road, and he did not like the flashing digital sign he saw that was attached to one side of the hotel advertising weekly rates and other specials.

“When I drove by it, I was shocked by what I saw,” he said. “I didn’t know that’s the kind of thing they were going to put up.”

I'm going to say the same thing as when then-County Commissioner Steve Cohen and I discussed this issue many years ago: "Bright Lights, Big City" (which I stole from the Jimmy Reed song of that title).

Here's the sign Herr Hedgepeth was horrified by:

Now here's what a city is supposed to have on its thoroughfares:

I rest my case.