The Highway: How to Remove Billboards

With his garish ties and gaudy boots, Douglas T. Snarr, 35, comes on like a big bad billboard. He is, indeed, the founder and president of Snarr Advertising, Inc., which owns 1,600 outdoor signs in 13 Western states. Yet Doug Snarr has also become a one-man lobby to ban billboards from any rural road built with federal financial help.

Why? First, because the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 commands such a ban—and Snarr stoutly insists that "when a law is enacted, it ought to be implemented." Second, if the law is ever funded, all billboard men who are put out of business by the act will be compensated—to the tune of $3 million in Snarr's case. A fervent capitalist, Snarr would like to start again, maybe in restaurants.

Jolting Motorists. The fact is that Lady Bird Johnson's famous highway-beautification program has become a parody of its original intentions. For one thing, the Federal Highway Administration has done virtually nothing to implement it. Because the law forbids rural-highway signs, many banks have also quit financing small billboard companies. Without cash for maintenance, a lot of billboards have been allowed to rot on the roadsides—becoming uglier than ever. Big billboard companies—still collecting rent on their legal signs in urban and commercial areas —are buying billboard locations cheap and building new signs, betting that the Government will not enforce the law in the foreseeable future. Some companies have also noted that the law forbids signs within 660 feet of an interstate highway, and are thus putting up monstrous billboards 661 feet from the roadside. In brief, the Beautification Act has worsened the billboard blight.

Snarr is confident that things will improve. After all, his whole life has been spent meeting challenges, including a childhood stutter, three Golden Gloves boxing championships in his native Idaho, and a tour as a Mormon missionary in Ireland ("Now that was tough," he roars). Snarr got into billboards because his father, a potato farmer, was too poor to send him to college. By designing weirdly shaped signs that visually jolted motorists, he earned his way through two years of Brigham Young University, then snagged a $400,000 sign contract from Harrah's casinos.

By 1965, Snarr Advertising had moved to Salt Lake City, boasted assets of $3.5 million, annual revenues of $800,000. Then the Beautification Act was passed. "My heart sank," Snarr recalls, "and the next week my bank called in a loan of $700,000."

"I wrestled and wrestled with what I should do," continues Snarr. "I finally realized that highway beautification was a fundamental responsibility of every citizen." He moved to persuade other billboard companies in Utah not to fight the act, then helped to get a state compliance law passed. Now he is trying to move the whole country.

The big obstacle is bureaucracy. Most states planned their beautification programs on a far too complex basis. Committees would choose the stretches of road to be cleaned up first. Then teams of engineers would draw survey maps, appraisers would evaluate every sign, Government would review the appraisals, and finally the billboard company would get a contract to remove a sign. The whole process, Snarr saw, could last decades and cost $2 billion or more.