Date: Tue, 16 Mar 2004 20:41:45 -0600

From: Chuck Mitchell <chuck@scenicwisconsin.org>

Reply-To: chuck@scenicwisconsin.org

Subject: Billboard Bills are Dead

 

Dear Friends,

The bills promoted by outdoor avertisers to allow reconstructing non-conforming billboards and to allow removal of more vegetation did not make it into the senate all this week. The 2003-2004 legislative session ended yesterday without AB496 on the senate agenda and without AB748 in the assembly or senate agenda. Unless the outdoor advertisers can pull an extraordinary feat of legislative manipulation and get some further action in some unusual way today, these bills are dead.

We can attribute our good fortune to several factors:

1. Delays all along the way in the transportation committees, some of it encouraged by our testimony at the public hearings.

2. Letters and emails from our members, friends and coalition organizations and bulletins from Citizens for a Scenic Wisconsin that weakened the resolve of the committee members to promote the billboard bills and encouraged legislators to oppose the bills.

3. The agendas of assembly and senate being generally jammed with all sorts of other bills, then the long debate over marriage of gay people this last week.

4. Messages and activism by most of our 15 members in senate majority leader Mary Panzer's district. Panzer is head of the rules committee that determines what gets scheduled in the senate.

Thanks to everybody that testified, wrote or called in opposition to these bills.  You prevented laws that would have made billboards permanent fixtures in our society.

Chuck Mitchell

Executive Director