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The short explanation of this alert was:
On May 4, the Senate passed an amendment to the emergency supplemental appropriations bill that will effectively gut the only provision of the Highway Beautification Act that has proven useful in removing old billboards from our rural and scenic highways. The amendment was introduced by Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) and will permit 13 states in the South and Southeast to opt out of the Highway Beautification Act's (HBA) provisions regarding destroyed "nonconforming" billboards. Currently, federal regulations say that if a nonconforming sign is knocked down in a storm, it has to stay down and cannot be reconstructed. One of the principal goals of the HBA was specifically to get rid of these signs, particularly those along rural and scenic stretches of the federal highway system. Remember, Sen. Bennett and his industry allies are trying to protect and rebuild signs that do not conform to federal and state law and regulations, meaning they are in places where they couldn't legally be built today or are too big or too close to other signs. (Legal conforming signs can be restored no matter what causes their demise; these signs are not at issue here.) The affected signs are mainly, but not exclusively, the old wooden billboards in rural and scenic areas that have been around for 30 years or more and have, by any reasonable measure, recouped the investment of the sign companies that erected them. The law wants them to go. Communities want them to go. Senator Bennett and the outdoor advertising industry want them to stay -- forever. Because of previous changes to the HBA that severely restrict the means by which states and localities can legally remove nonconforming signs, the method of getting rid of the old nonconforming signs through the process of attrition, abetted by Acts of God, is one of the few tools left to communities trying to rid themselves of billboard blight. Without this provision, there will be almost no teeth left in the HBA and those old 30-year-old billboards will be replaced with permanent structures that will be around forever in spite of the desire of local communities to remove them. The amendment will now be considered by a conference committee made up of members of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees. They will resolve differences between the Senate version of the emergency supplemental appropriation bill (H.R. 4939), which contains the Bennett amendment, and the House version, which does not. Scenic America's goal is to remove the amendment from the final emergency supplemental appropriations bill that will be created by the conference committee. Tell your Senators and Representatives that you do not support this sneaky, underhanded method of changing one of the most important scenic conservation laws in the country. Ask them to urge the House-Senate conference committee to remove the Bennett amendment from the final supplemental appropriations bill.

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