Alaska Outdoor Journal

Nearly 40 years later, billboards have not driven tourists away. Last year, tourists spent a record $304 million in Pennington County and booked a record number of hotel rooms in Rapid City.

But concern about billboards cluttering the landscape also has not gone away. After unsuccessful attempts to restrict billboards through the state Legislature and through a city task force, local billboard opponents are forcing the issue.

For the first time next week, Rapid City voters will have a direct say in controlling billboards with two initiated ballot measures.

The first measure would ban new digital billboards, double the required distance       between new and existing billboards to 2,000 feet and fix the maximum size at              250 square feet.

The second would establish a 20-year expiration date on sign credits, the city’s currency for new billboards.

If the measures pass, voters won’t wake up June 8 to a billboard-free city. But supporters hope that over time, the changes in Rapid City will contribute to the continued gradual reduction in signs in the region.

Opponents say just the opposite will happen: that without the ability to trade old, unprofitable signs for a smaller number of more profitable digital signs, there is no incentive to reduce the number of signs. There is no historic count, but judging from old news reports, it seems there are fewer outdoor advertisements today than decades ago. A 1963 Rapid City Daily Journal article, “Billboard Jungles Again Target for State Action,” reported there had been 84 signs between Wall and the Badlands on what is now S.D. Highway 240, the Badlands Loop Scenic Byway, until Wall businessmen secured rights of way and replaced them with just three signs.

Then and now, efforts to limit billboards have been two steps forward, one step back. That same year when the Wall community tore down the sign clutter, 1963, three attempts from state lawmakers to control signs failed.

The number of billboards in Rapid City has declined since 2002, when the city began offering “credits” to encourage sign companies to remove old, dilapidated signs. Legal signs that don’t conform to sign code can be removed for two sign credits.