Oops, apparently not brief enough. And sorry I didn’t finish this yesterday, it just never works out to blog at work even when I think I have the time and flexibility. Sadly, this was perhaps, the most interesting part of the evening with all the talk about chainsaws and evilness and the comparison to Cuba. This is the first part of the blog. Also, after the recap will be some information about what draft they were looking at – it was in legistar, I just didn’t recognize it due to the way it was labeled and the way it was talked about. I sent an email to the council and Council President Chris Schmidt sent a helpful email in response. And finally, let me just say, these are the times (but not always) that I love this mayor! Why don’t other people have this passion for the city and protect it the way he does! 🙂
UDC ALTERNATE TO PROCESS FOR ADVERTISING SIGN BANKS AND REPLACEMENT ADVERTISING SIGNS
Alder Mike Verveer is asking questions of staff about the billboards and the changes UDC made to the ordinance compared to the original. Matt Tucker, the zoning administrator, just got done explaining that if the purpose of the ordinance was to be a carrot to get billboards out of the way of redevelopment, then the ordinance should allow for that and that there is a 5 year sunset. Lara Marinella from the City Attorney’s office adds that since the UDC staff got together and came up with some improvements about how redevelopment is redefined and it is written down but not in front of them at this point. They could provide that. Verveer asks if that would be tonight? She says yes? Verveer asks if it would be changes to chapter 31? Verveer asks her to tell them about the changes – is it tremendously lengthy? Tucker says that this makes it more clear but they laugh. Marinella says that what they have in front of them describes eligibility as property is scheduled for redevelopment including removal of element, construction of new improvements and issuance of permits for those improvements and the final sentence say that and only if the billboard must be removed to accommodate the new improvement. They were concerned that it could be difficult to determine when the sign must be removed to accommodate the development. That could be a debate between the developer, the staff and the sign company. What if they are repairing the roof and the sign is on the roof. Is that development? In order to tighten that up they did have to have a lengthy explanation and it goes something like this: All of the existing language would be there and then it would say, “only if the advertising sign must be removed because the sign is located in the same physical space as a new inmprovement other than a new sign would be constructed or adjacent to a new improvement such that he proximity of the sign would result in a building code violation. Removal of an existing advertising sign and construction of a new advertising sign on the same site shall not be considered redevelopment under this subsection and will not result in the square footage being banked.” Verveer says that definitely clarifies. Verveer also asks if the map was distributed by their office – Tucker says there is a larger one behind Mike May, the city attorney. (While several documents were added to legistar, the map they are talking about does not appear to be in there.) Tucker offers to walk them through the information on the map and explains to the lobbyist how he can see the map (remember, after all this new information is given, there is no time for public testimony). Tucker says the areas in yellow are in the city of Madison and includes other areas that are limited, the areas in purple are zoning districts where the replacement billboards can be constructed, the red asterisks are existing billboards, on the isthmus there are green hatched areas that are the historic districts where billboards cannot be located, the red boundary around the downtown area or central district which is an area where billboards are restricted in the sign code. The most difficult one to see is the blue hatch area which are the Urban Design Districts (University Ave, west beltline by Schroeder Rd, Park St, John Nolen Rd and East Beltline, Stoughton Rd, E Washington Ave, Aberg Ave.) where signs cannot be located. The map is a little different from existing law. Annexed areas after 1987 can allow replacement billboards mostly by the airport and on the south side, Town of Madison, Town of Burke. (They show the map on TV, but its mostly not readable in any detail)
Chris Schmidt has copies of the new language Lara Marinella gave to redefine redevelopment. He wanted them to stay focused on his amendment for now and the question of redevelopment. He says they wandered a bit beyond it, that is what he structured his amendment to do. He says that when he said they wanted to keep it simple it wasn’t about staff implementing it but that they don’t need to over think it because there are not that many areas where “we are going to get burned, if any”. He says that Union Corners might be a good example of why this might now work. He says that the billboard company could relocate the billboard before the development happens and waiting for the permit might work against them. If they limit it to just redevelopment it might leave them someplace they don’t want to be. The time element doesn’t change much, there is a thought that we can wait for the billboards to fall down and they aren’t going to. They will only come down if there is a mutual agreement between the billboard company and the leaseholder or the leaseholder decides it doesn’t want it there any more. They will only go away at the end of the lease and the leaseholder won’t give up the income. By allowing the cap and replace, they enable the option to occur. The idea that they limit it to redevelopment only is based on some idea that this is going to get out of hand, we aren’t going to have roving bands of billboards looking for a new home. This isn’t going to be a huge issue, we won’t see much attrition. 25 years after the ban we have the same number of signs. Society has to change and decide they are no longer valuable. They will go on until the advertising isn’t generating the income. We can’t tear them down, they’re not going to go away, so we might as well enable moving them when it suits our interest, in redevelopment and in other scenarios. This may cut back on the lawsuits and they aren’t just going to move it for fun when its a $20,000 investment. (No, they’re going to move it to make more money!) He wants them to vote on his amendment and if they don’t pass it they will talk about the language Tucker and Marinella came up with. But, he wants to stress that doesn’t change the core argument about the issue at hand.
Mayor Paul Soglin (ah, he wanted to speak on this issue!) says this is the 47th year since alderwoman Ashman first introduced legislation first dealing with billboards. There are fewer billboards in Madison than in comparable cities in size and population and there is fewer for a reason, we don’t want them and we have taken steps through our ordinances and maybe it will take another 47 years until another 5 are gone, but maybe in 200 years our legacy will be no billboards and maybe in that 200 year period we’ll get some changes in the state legislature to make this easier. They inherited some real estate with some property owners that had billboards and they had to negotiate their way out of it and they worked with Adams and they found there are other situations where there need to be removed to allow development to go forward which may happen because this is all triggered by the property on Regent St. There is another way of doing this, where some residents in Marsha Rummels District found out several years ago that you can grab a chain saw and quickly saw through the 3 posts – but tht doesn’t work on metal billboards any more. He says on Regent St. where a property owner entered into a lease, they made money, but they now want to redevelop and they want us to now step in and replace the billboard where it will last even longer, they still have a lease for 7 more years. If we do this, all we will do is encourage property owners with leases to continue renewing them year after year, decade after decade and those who are forward thinking about the value of their property might think differently otherwise. If we do cap and replace all we are doing is incentivizing the continuation of the leases which we will have to buy out. There are some billboards that are not very profitable relative to where they could be, the number and demographics of the people who drive by aren’t as valuable. So what we will do is allow them to move them to where they can make more money, where is our cut of it? All we are doing is incentivising the billboards. If were going to adopt this ordinance, lets at least get a fee out of it. Lets get come money for the capital budget and create neighborhood centers. We are creating a partnership and getting nothing in return. If the property owners know that we will bail them out, they will keep extending the leases, if we are cautious and restrictive, the property owners will have to rethink the leases and who knows, we may find in a few years that 4 or 5 of the leases aren’t renewed, particularly in neighborhoods where we are seeing more investment, its that simple.
Schmidt seeks suspension of the rules to speak for the third time. No objections. He says that you can’t remove billboards by vandalism, we heard someone cut one down one time, but if they cut them down now, they can put them back up. (Seriously Chris, you couldn’t tell the mayor was just telling a humorous story? You don’t think he was seriously suggesting that do you?) The lower value of billboards is interesting because they are more likely to be in the blighted areas, in the areas where there is more distress and we want to see improved, so we are saying we don’t want to move them out of areas that are blighted, maybe we want to incentivise them to go someplace else. (Again, seriously, everyone knows that any area can be found to be blighted because is has a dead bird on the property or a cracked sidewalk, please.) The idea that we’re buying them out, incentivising them, we’re giving them something, if we leave the redevelopment language in, its still there, just slightly different. The idea is that we wait for them to renew until they have a redevelopment opportunity. He says hes been in Madison for 17 years and he lived in Illinois and has seen the billboards in Rockford and he’s been all over the country and seen billboards, we have been forward thinking, but there is a reality that they won’t go away in our lifetime, we have an advantage when we get them to move. We get redevelopment. Are we punishing people for being business people, is that the idea. They are not evil, they might be unsightly, you may not like them, we might want them to go away, but they don’t have a social impact like a payday loan store that preys on people and takes their money, we’re talking about a sign and a lot of effort has been spent over the years to limit them and we’ve probably spent way too much time discussing this when we have bigger priorities to discuss. All he is simply asking is for cap and replace and back the area, it won’t increase by one square inch how much is out there, in fact it creates the scenario where they can combine faces and they could be bigger, but there would be less faces. I don’t know if that will happen, that’s what goes on in Lincoln. They have a lot more smaller billboards because they are trading for digital signs, but we don’t have the same rules here and we don’t have that many billboards here so we won’t see that behavior. He prefers the simpler language.
Lucas Daley says he was disturbed by the mayors comment about where the city’s cut is if it generates more income in a new location, that sounded a litle, uh, I don’t know. Anyways, he says its not about the number of signs, that is a good metric we should pay attention to, but ultimately we are talking about the harm to the urban environment and ultimately if we move them from a residential area that is struggling to establish an identity and take control of its environment and moving it to where there is little to no harm, that is a pure win and I don’t see that as a loss. Sure maybe waiting it out that wooden sign might fall over, but either way the harm is dramatically mitigated. (Yeah, kinda elitist, get this sign out of my Regent – wealthy – neighborhood and put it where the poor people live by the highways and major traffic corridors – wow.)
Verveer doesn’t support the amendment and wants people think twice before going for this simple approach. Perhaps because he has been around for so long he is skittish of a change in the policy, yes our policy hasn’t changes in 20 some years, and they billboards will go away with the current policy, that is the established city policy. The council has been asked several times in the last 26 years to rethink the policy and the council didn’t support it, most recently with Jed Sanborn. He appreciates the hard work put into this, but this is a big deal, if this is adopted we are allowing the trading of billboards in our community. He says he did a email search for Adams Outdoor Advertising to find an email and what came up more than anything was emails from the city attorney’s office about all the litigation we have had with this great company from the Town of Madison, the good corporate citizens make donations of advertising to good organizaitons, they do that throughout the country, he doesn’t doubt that, but he is saying that emails about litigation and state law change considerations, to me are relevant because if we have this real simple approach and not worry about every single word and count on our staff to give us good language, he thinks that we might be in for more than we bargained for by allowing the total trading of billboards in this proposal. The plan commission adopted overwhelmingly an ordinance that for every one square foot they replace they would have to have two square feet taken down. Urban Design Commission (UDC) Chair Dick Wagner sent a memo saying that if this is about redevelopment, then lets address that. Verveer is willing to support the UDC version, but not excited about it. The other thing to consider is the map staff distributed, he says every billboard in his district has been removed in the last two decades, so this has no effect on the core downtown, but he asks his colleagues to look at the map and decide if your districts are now eligible for this new sign without input from the alder, neighborhood association etc, by right. Look at the purple areas and think about all the money we put into areas of E. Washington Ave. and the approach from the airport, do we want to greet visitors to our community with more billboards, not less. He thinks there is more to this than has been portrayed and asks them to follow recommendations from UDC and staff.
Mark Clear agrees with Schmidt and Daley. He says this comes down to if you think billboards are inherently evil or not and if you come down on the later side. This is like our long standing policy on Cuba, thinking that suddenly after 53 years we are on the verge of defeating this organization. You can see on the map there are still plenty of billboards and I don’t think that is evil. I support the amendments, I think they provide a path to move forward at a number of places we want to relocate them. The mayor talked about getting our cut, the way to do that is if we had the ability to tax the billboard based on its value, but the legislature doesn’t impact that.
Daley talks for the third time, he asks attorney may about the sunset clause, could the body repeal it in a year if this is counterproductive. Attorney Mike May says you could repeal it but not impact what happened in the interim.
Vote on Amendment
Rummel asks for it to be restated since it is complicated. Sigh . . . . Schmidt reads the new language which I think is here now and nothing was added. Cnare asks for clarifications too, Schmidt tries again. Sunset language is still in there. Chair thinks the ayes have it. They request roll call.
Aye: Ahrens, Bidar, Cheeks (what!), Clausius, Clear, Cnare, DeMarb, Daley, Palm, Phair, Resnick :(, Schmidt, Strausser, Subeck
No: Verveer, Weier, Zellers, King, Rummel, Skidmore
(Man . . . when you want the alders to be parochial and protect their neighborhods them don’t?! What?! Stupid mayoral politics and campaign contributions more important than good policy for their neighborhoods. boo.)
Vote on Ordinance
UDC version as amended. Passes.
END THE MEETING
Introductions from the floor.
Denise DeMarb 36731, 6 lots to be a park at Owl Creek. Not sure where it is getting referred.
Schmidt 36643 – IT specialist position, referred to Personnel and Board of Estimates
Schmidt 36723 – Verona/Allied Drive Grocery Store report referred to Board of Estimates
Mayor congratulates Rachel Rodriguez for her first time clerking for the council meeting. “Absolutely flawless up here” Council claps.
MY EMAIL TO THE COUNCIL
Here’s another thing you can do to make public participation easier. When you have handouts at your desk, make sure there are additional copies for the public. Or again, post them on the TV screens. Amendments could be handled the same way. Its really hard for the public to testify on something they can’t see, it looks terrible when the lobbyist has a copy, but the public doesn’t have access to the item – this is in reference to the sign issue last night.
As long as you’re thinking about things, I thought I’d put that in the hopper! Again, thanks for all you do!
COUNCIL PRESIDENT CHRIS SCHMIDT’S RESPONSE
Chris is also responding to a few other emails I sent, which will make more sense in a later blog post.
Hi Brenda,
The text that UDC adopted on the billboards ordinance was on Legistar in “5570billboard ALT LM edits 111414.pdf”, but it wasn’t clear that it was the UDC language. What Alders received was the same language but with the changes from the original proposed draft ordinance highlighted (most changes, I should say, a couple were missed and I caught them in the amendment). There was a second version of the UDC language that had the staff recommended changes if we had chosen to go with the eligibility language – that will be on Legistar as well, but was not distributed given how the vote went. I had intended to have the files I had prepared yesterday for the meeting added to the Legistar file, but in the rushing about I forgot to ask for that. They should be up there soon. As far as I know, the folks from Adams did not have a copy of the document that Alders received, though they had been informed of what I intended to move as an amendment.In any case, your point is well taken, and using the screens is something we’ve discussed before, and worth looking at again. We’ve done that some years for the DPW Platform and Resolutions debates, so I know it can work.
With respect to your earlier email with the three suggestions, Alder Clear suggested tinkering with the early public comment process as well, and that seemed well received. I’m not sure why there are restrictions on it to begin with, I imagine it was “a good idea at the time” or whatever. At CCOC we also discussed allowing the President to set the “orders of the day”, presumably during the consent agenda, and s/he would take into account the registrations and expected length of debate and lay out an order for the separated items (which could be modified by floor action, of course). I want to talk to the Attorney’s office about the equity lens – I am concerned that in an effort to be equitable we end up being inequitable by consistently, if unintentionally, favoring or disfavoring one group of speakers over another. What I am thinking today (which could change, of course) is that there be some guidelines for the President in setting “orders of the day” that would highlight the considerations about the speakers such as how long they are able to wait, their experience and comfort level with the process, etc. And maybe that is basically what you mean.
If you have any others ideas on this I would love to hear them. I hope to introduce something soon, we’ve let this issue fester for way too long. At a minimum I hope to include opening up early public comment and allowing the President to set the agenda order during the consent agenda.
And speaking of the consent agenda – we did move suspension and took it up early rather than recessing for 15 minutes. That is worth talking about as well – by putting it on the agenda at 6:45 we create confusion because it is scheduled on top of the public hearings, and the expectation that it is at 6:45 without making it clear that we can do it earlier. My immediate thought is to investigate an electronic way to show what has been dealt with and what is coming up. And we should talk about the scheduling of the consent agenda – today’s thought is that either we stick to 6:45 and don’t allow suspension to do it earlier, or we remove that expectation and say it could be right at the start of the meeting. I’ll look into how hard it would be to post online, or if there is some weird issue with that.
thanks,
Chris
