[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[House]
[Pages 15887-15888]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       HIGHWAY BEAUTIFICATION ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Farr) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FARR. Mr. Speaker, I rise on a lighter note, a very positive note 
because I represent a very beautiful and positive part of the United 
States: the central coast of California. This is a place where you hear 
the towns of Santa Cruz, Monterey, Pacific Grove, the beautiful fertile 
Salinas Valley, and the magnificent Big Sur coastline, which this 
poster here shows a photograph of.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today because the House of Representatives, 50 
years ago, passed marvelous legislation called the Highway 
Beautification Act, and that act came about because the States were 
ruining the aesthetics of America. It was a bill that First Lady Lady 
Bird Johnson so much supported. In fact, it became known as Lady Bird's 
bill.
  So 50 years ago, this House of Representatives took a bold move to 
protect and improve our scenic highways. Why are those important?
  We sell scenery where I live. This is another picture of a scenic 
highway in the South, in the Southern States. When you drive through 
these, you don't see any billboards, you don't see the urban clutter, 
or, as my friend Ansel Adams said: ``You don't see the urban acne that 
is covering our roads.''
  It is Big Business that we are fighting, because the billboard lobby 
in the United States is very powerful. It was powerful then, but the 
First Lady was more powerful.
  I have a personal story in that because my father, who was in the 
California State Senate, authored the first legislation to create the 
California Scenic Highway Program. In 1966, this time of the year, Lady 
Bird Johnson came all the way to California, not to campaign for a 
Governor or United States Senator, but to recognize the work that my 
father, State Senator Fred Farr, had done by dedicating Highway 1 in 
California, the Big Sur highway, as California's first State scenic 
highway and perhaps the first State scenic highway in the United 
States. It was a great day.
  What Congress did is they ensured that States would be able to have 
money to enforce this billboard ban. They would give them more money if 
they would incorporate in their State, county, and city laws billboard 
bans.
  Now, we have a $7 billion industry out there, the outdoor advertising 
industry, and it has been fighting highway beautification for over 50 
years. They have been unsuccessful at repealing the Federal law, but 
they have made incredible progress in being able to find exemptions for 
it.
  They have prevented the 10 percent penalty that States would receive 
for not adopting highway beautification. They have encouraged 
localities to change zoning laws in rural areas, calling them 
commercial or industrial or anything to bypass the act. And they have 
been able to loosen the rules on repairing old signs, allowing them to 
remain forever rather than being torn down.
  We now have approximately 700,000 billboards in the United States, 
and yet this is a country that will be celebrating its 100th 
anniversary of our National Park System. We advertise around the world: 
``Come to beautiful America. See the scenery of America.'' In many 
places in America, all you see is billboard scenery.
  So as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this act--which is not 
well known in Congress, nor in the country, yet is a very significant 
act because of what it did to empower States and local communities to 
have the ability to prevent billboards from going up and giving them 
funds for taking them down and to make sure that people are sensitive 
to why this is important for our scenery--let's recommit to 
strengthening the program.
  As I said, we sell scenery. We sell watchable wildlife. The economy 
of the central coast depends on the beauty. As long as the beauty is 
there, people are going to come to the Carmels and Pacific Groves and 
Montereys, where California history began.
  People are spending more money on watchable wildlife. More people are 
watching wildlife in America than watch all of the sports combined. It 
is an unbelievable figure: of all the sports, all the football, all the 
baseball, all the hockey, basketball, you name it, more people look at 
wildlife.

[[Page 15888]]

  So let's protect what is really unique to America, something that God 
gave us and only we can destroy. These hundreds of thousands of signs 
are robbing America of its scenic view, of its iconic images that once 
defined the open road.
  I would like to quote Ogden Nash, who summed it up wonderfully in a 
poem, ``Song of the Open Road'':

     I think that I shall never see,
     A billboard as lovely as a tree.
     Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
     I will never see a tree at all.

  Let's help protect America's beauty. Let's ban billboards.

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