The Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight (SCRUB) has won two significant victories this past week against billboard proponents and the Zoning Board of Adjustment (ZBA) - one involving FDR Park and what would have been four double-faced signs, the other an enormous wall wrap on a building on North Seventh Street.
The success is bittersweet; SCRUB and its supporters are tired, they say, of asking the city to follow its own zoning code. Sam Stretton, attorney for SCRUB, says, "It is our hope that the Zoning Board of Adjustment will start following the law and stop believing it is above the law."
In the case affecting FDR Park, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a Commonwealth Court decision that reversed variances allowing for four billboards that would have been on property adjacent to I-95 and next to the park.
Mary Tracy, executive director of SCRUB, says that in granting Conrail the variances, the ZBA violated seven zoning-code provisions, which include prohibitions against signs within 660 feet of a park and within 660 feet of an access ramp of I-95. SCRUB appealed the board decision to the Court of Common Pleas, which reversed it. Conrail and the ZBA took it to the Commonwealth Court, which affirmed the lower court's ruling. Though Conrail attorney Thomas Leonard argued unnecessary hardship on grounds that the "recreational" zoning classification for the property is improper and therefore an unfair basis on which to be judged, the commonwealth ruled that regardless, Conrail was required to comply with the section of the zoning code, enacted in 1991, which provides controls on outdoor advertising.
Further, the court concluded that "a mere showing of economic hardship or that a property could be utilized more profitably [with a display sign] is insufficient to support the grant of a variance."
Stretton is particularly excited about the wall-wrap ruling, even though the Common Pleas Court's decision will no doubt be appealed. He says it's precedent-setting. "We would have seen these wall wraps pop up all over the city" in an attempt by building owners and advertisers to circumvent zoning codes written with traditional signage in mind, he says.
One of the issues was whether wall wraps constitute signs or "murals," says Stretton. "We convinced a court that these are in fact signs."
Attorney Carl Primavera, who represented the New York-basedad firm Metro Lights, says, "Nobody is meant to be handcuffed by the zoning code; it's meant to be aspirational - up to the discretion and good judgment of the board." He says that when these cases move out to state courts, things tend not to go well for billboard proponents. "The Zoning Board is pro-development, pro-jobs. … Judges from the hinterlands tend to be cautious, literal and conservative." SCRUB, he says, "is trying to protect us from ourselves. There is an elitism at work. Signage is part of the American life."
Stretton would disagree. Signs are a "major quality-of-life issue" and rulings such as these "will help prevent pollution," he contends.