Highway Beautification Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise on a lighter note, a very positive note because I represent a very beautiful and positive part of the United States: the central coast of California. This is a place where you hear the towns of Santa Cruz, Monterey, Pacific Grove, the beautiful fertile Salinas Valley, and the magnificent Big Sur coastline, which this poster here shows a photograph of.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because the House of Representatives, 50 years ago, passed marvelous legislation called the Highway Beautification Act, and that act came about because the States were ruining the aesthetics of America. It was a bill that First Lady Lady Bird Johnson so much supported. In fact, it became known as Lady Bird's bill.

So 50 years ago, this House of Representatives took a bold move to protect and improve our scenic highways. Why are those important?

We sell scenery where I live. This is another picture of a scenic highway in the South, in the Southern States. When you drive through these, you don't see any billboards, you don't see the urban clutter, or, as my friend Ansel Adams said: ``You don't see the urban acne that is covering our roads.''

It is Big Business that we are fighting, because the billboard lobby in the United States is very powerful. It was powerful then, but the First Lady was more powerful.

I have a personal story in that because my father, who was in the California State Senate, authored the first legislation to create the California Scenic Highway Program. In 1966, this time of the year, Lady Bird Johnson came all the way to California, not to campaign for a Governor or United States Senator, but to recognize the work that my father, State Senator Fred Farr, had done by dedicating Highway 1 in California, the Big Sur highway, as California's first State scenic highway and perhaps the first State scenic highway in the United States. It was a great day.

What Congress did is they ensured that States would be able to have money to enforce this billboard ban. They would give them more money if they would incorporate in their State, county, and city laws billboard bans.

Now, we have a $7 billion industry out there, the outdoor advertising industry, and it has been fighting highway beautification for over 50 years. They have been unsuccessful at repealing the Federal law, but they have made incredible progress in being able to find exemptions for it.

They have prevented the 10 percent penalty that States would receive for not adopting highway beautification. They have encouraged localities to change zoning laws in rural areas, calling them commercial or industrial or anything to bypass the act. And they have been able to loosen the rules on repairing old signs, allowing them to remain forever rather than being torn down.

We now have approximately 700,000 billboards in the United States, and yet this is a country that will be celebrating its 100th anniversary of our National Park System. We advertise around the world: ``Come to beautiful America. See the scenery of America.'' In many places in America, all you see is billboard scenery.

So as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this act--which is not well known in Congress, nor in the country, yet is a very significant act because of what it did to empower States and local communities to have the ability to prevent billboards from going up and giving them funds for taking them down and to make sure that people are sensitive to why this is important for our scenery--let's recommit to strengthening the program.

As I said, we sell scenery. We sell watchable wildlife. The economy of the central coast depends on the beauty. As long as the beauty is there, people are going to come to the Carmels and Pacific Groves and Montereys, where California history began.

People are spending more money on watchable wildlife. More people are watching wildlife in America than watch all of the sports combined. It is an unbelievable figure: of all the sports, all the football, all the baseball, all the hockey, basketball, you name it, more people look at wildlife.

So let's protect what is really unique to America, something that God gave us and only we can destroy. These hundreds of thousands of signs are robbing America of its scenic view, of its iconic images that once defined the open road.

I would like to quote Ogden Nash, who summed it up wonderfully in a poem, ``Song of the Open Road'':

I think that I shall never see,
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I will never see a tree at all.

Let's help protect America's beauty. Let's ban billboards.

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