Op-ed: Billboard environmental impact reports are a sham

If ever there was a case where there would be serious environmental impact, it’s San Jose’s plan to install enormous digital billboards on buildings downtown and at sites along freeways.

These publicly-owned locations include The Tech Interactive, San Jose Center for Performing Arts, San Jose McEnery Convention Center and several city-owned garages. The proposed billboards would advertise national brands, not local businesses or nonprofits, most of the time.

Would this turn downtown into a cheap rendition of Times Square or Las Vegas? It would certainly put us on that path, with more to follow.

Would this undermine the environmentally conscientious image the city attempts to project? Yes, because digital billboards are the antithesis of being eco-friendly.

Would downtown visitors and residents be a captive audience to unsolicited advertising for which there is no “off” switch? Yes, they would.

Yet the additional damage new digital billboards would cause is ignored and misrepresented by environmental reviews, such as the “Initial Study/Mitigated Negative Declaration” document recently released by the city and paid for by Orange Barrel Media — the same company seeking approval of the downtown sites.

The one-size-fits-all environmental report also does not capture how multiple billboards affect a community — totally missing what city planners call “cumulative impact.” The San Jose billboard project in the pipeline, with seven giant digital billboards downtown and several more freeway-facing billboards, will certainly have a cumulative impact. After exposure to an ad for a national brand at one location, you’ll walk a block and be exposed to another. This cumulative impact totally changes an area and will compromise the character, architectural integrity and environmental quality of downtown San Jose.

We at No Digital Billboards in San Jose believe this review process is a sham and has been from the beginning. The city has done everything it can to avoid accurately assessing the environmental impact of new billboards.

After reading the first few pages of the report, the average person can easily surmise that the review is biased in favor of approving the proposed billboards, especially since it starts with the conclusion that they “would have no aesthetic impact” and “less than significant light pollution impact.”

Really? Two giant screens in front of the Center for Performing Arts will have no aesthetic impact, each being a 60 feet wide, 22 feet tall electronic display for commercial ads? It will not disrespect the local architecture? Of course it will. And any official who states otherwise surely knows better.

We’re tired of politicians who promise revenue from billboards that won’t materialize, the removal of existing conventional billboards that won’t be taken down and the make-believe transformation of downtown into a nightlife destination, all by the magic of in-your-face digital billboards.

Decision makers at San Jose City Council should understand this recently released environmental review of the proposed downtown billboards is deceitful and utterly biased. Just because a report is identified as “environmental” with pages of technical jargon, doesn’t mean that it’s a well-designed, comprehensive analytical instrument upon which decisions with decades-long implications should be made.

Remember, the city’s own survey with more than 2,000 respondents showed overwhelming opposition to new digital billboards. So-called environmental report or not, the moral of this story is not to put San Jose into the billboard business. Learn how to say no to digital billboards in San Jose while there is still time to do so.

Jason Hemp, Les Levitt and John Miller are founders of No Digital Billboards in San Jose.