Carroll Shaddock Interview, Part 2 of 3

CS: Still shouldn't have made that jab at the mayor, but I'm mad at him right now.

DT: When we left off on the last tape, we were talking about an area that included the City Beautiful movement and Mister Hogg's Civic Forum and an effort to have an orderly and beautiful City of Houston and that towards the twenties, end of the twenties, there were some cross currents that changed that direction for the city.

CS: Yes, it was I was going to say that the centerpiece of this architectural idea was to be a City Hall, for which I think preliminary plans were made which would be a magnificent building in this Romanesque, Tuscan style.

It suffered the same fate as the library at Rice. When William Ward Watkin laid out Rice, the centerpiece of the campus was to be a a beautiful library building which he designed in the style of architecture which unified the old Rice campus, which at times has been followed and at times, then, not followed.

We're currently coming out of a phase in which the old forms were followed and entering into one where they're they're no longer being observed again. But that comes and goes.

The the library was never built at Rice, but as I understand it, it was built either at USC or UCLA and it is a it is a a a renowned building where it did get built. But that is the building that was originally built to be designed to be the library at Rice.

And then in right after World War II, the library that was built there is of a a somewhat nondescript or some would even say pedestrian building. Certainly nothing like the fantastical building that William Ward Watkin designed.

However, the same thing I must say same thing happened with the city, that the City Hall was not built and some of the things that signaled this shift were the defeat of zoning, the the really, everybody forgetting about the implementation of the parkway and bayou floodplain plans and ideas

and the construction of a City Hall, twelve stories in height of art deco architecture which was the symbolic way to shift that. Out with the old and in with the new and and this is the land of opportunity and free enterprise and no planning and nobody tells anybody what to do.

One other figure in this I want to mention briefly is Jesse Jones, who I think is people familiar all people familiar with Houston's past know was the the most important single figure in in Houston history. I'm sure that one would still have to say that today.

And incidentally, the man who I our the law firm in which I've practiced, which for I guess for many years was called Liddell Sapp, now called Locke, Lord, Bissell and Liddell seven hundred lawyers in seventeen cities or something like that. We represented the Jones people who constituted a whole law practice for a whole law firm in and of themselves.

Jesse Jones, I mean, Jesse Jesse am I saying that right? Jesse Jones was a a great admirer of Paris. He loved Paris and his vision for Houston was for Houston to be like Paris, the most important component of that being that there be a ten story height limit on buildings constructed in Houston.

And through the twenties, when he was the biggest developer he was sort of like Uncle Scrooge in in the Disney Donald Duck comic books in that he owned the biggest bank, the main newspaper, the main radio station, later the main television station, the three leading hotels and the five leading office buildings in the city.

He had one of everything in his empire, which today finds expression in the Houston endowment, which is a huge endowment which funds so many good things in Houston. He Mister Jones lives on in the Houston Endowment.

I don't think you can talk to anything anybody about anything environmental, conservation, educational, social, medical or anything without the hand of the Houston Endowment being everywhere, supporting supporting things that could never exist without their help.

But any rate, he lost that one and a building called the Scanlon Building was built downtown, nineteen stories tall. He fought very hard to prevent the construction of the building, saying that a city with high rise buildings would be an ugly city. It should be like Paris.

And when they gave a permit to do that, he said well, okay, I'll show them and he built the Gulf Building, which is a thirty-four story building which at the time was the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi and was then for decades the tallest building in Houston.

And but any rate, he had built that building as a as a as a statement of defiance that his his dreams for a more beautiful Houston had been thwarted.

There's a nice symbolic thing about the Gulf Building that probably should be mentioned when we're talking about visual aspect, visual conservation, scenic environment there's a lot of searching around for the best name for whatever you call all of this.

In about 1955, the Gulf it was called the Gulf Building because the Gulf Oil Corporation, they had their world headquarters in that building along with Houston's largest bank called the National Bank of Commerce.

Jesse Jones and the National Bank of Commerce funded all the Houston banks so we had no bank failures in the Depression here due to his due to his action. He was a figure larger than life.

Gulf Oil, which in its marketing campaigns used a a round orange circle I think it had a a white G imposed on the circle on all of its gasoline stations. It was announced in the early sixties with great fanfare that a sign would be placed on top of the Gulf Building and it was, which it was always referred to as the lollipop because this round orange disc was three or four building stories in height and dominated the downtown skyline for decades.

And you know, I didn't really have a didn't much of the of I did not have a passionate interest in these times in these topics when this happened. I don't think I was even in Houston when the sign got put up there

but I remember hearing the stories that many prominent Houstonians were publicly cutting up their Gulf credit cards. You we back then you would have a credit card for just about everybody you did business with saying they'd never buy Gulf gasoline.

And I remember then Gulf had threatened to sue prominent Houstonians who were doing that, saying that that was a conspiracy and restraint of trade and actionable. But I guess the the the objections were a whimper and that was the that was the zeitgeist of that time.

My mother likes to talk about how, after World War II, as she said, we all gave away our Oriental carpets, we all moved to suburban new houses. She said our dream always that we would read is that you could push a button and it would clean your house and so that efficiency and ease and so forth came to be the newthe new values of the day.

And one one thinks of Italian villages which would gladly destroy all of their artistic and architectural heritage if they could just each have a washing machine. And it's pretty easy for us not to appreciate that outlook today because we have so much more than they did then.

But these were really the dark days whether were talking about billboards or trees or the preservation of of character of place. The post World War II period is a low point and a big overarching story of my lifetime has been the the huge shift to valuing and caring about these these things and these values.

And perhaps the challenge, the one I've experienced for the last two days being in Austin, trying to deal with the billboard issue before the Texas Department of Transportation, the frustration of it is that even though the battle has been won with the public, nobody has really figured out how to translate that into the operative mode by which our country, our city, our state are planned and what happens. Well come back to that theme. (misc.)

CS: The what's happened subsequent to the establishment of Trees for Houston and its having a staff is a pretty long story but I could try to hit a few highlights.

For one thing, projects have gone on. The project that I really worked on the most was called for Trees for Boulevard Oaks. Boulevard Oaks is a neighborhood in which north and south boulevard are located which most people would say have said in 1982 when I moved there that with my family that that was had the best trees in Houston.

And yet, we surveyed and found that a perfect pattern of trees there would require twenty-three hundred trees and only thirteen hundred were in place. So we set of a goal of planting the thousand missing trees by the end of the century, not understanding that that was one year farther off than it was because the end of the century didnt occur till the end of 2000, not the beginning of 2000.

So we actually finished a a year early. We set a goal to plant the thousand trees. We established a methodology for doing it whereby a neighborhood raises money at large and then goes block by block and plants trees,

decoupling so to speak the idea that a person pays for a tree at the person's house, but a neighborhood plants the streets, the public streets or what like sidewalks connect a neighborhood and give it connectivity.

Biggest difficulty that we have in in get getting people to let us plant trees come firstly from elderly people, some of whom just don't want trees,

and and the second group are design professionals, often landscape architects or architects who have very firm ideas about how they want their project to be seen and understood.

So it's a constant process of trying to shift the view from standing in the street and looking at the house or the building and instead turning and looking up and down the street and creating the ethic that says what you do on your side of the sidewalk is your project,

but what the sidewalk, the tree lawn, the streets are the thing that establish connectivity in neighborhood and landscape the street and you must sublimate your own view of what you want to do to a larger vision.

And and that's a process that's been very successful but that's the process that you have to go through over and over again.

That project was successfully completed, the west end of South Boulevard, for example, is all white oak trees, which by which turn beautiful red color every fall in Houston, Texas. Try to plant those wherever we can because they really do create a sense of seasons. They're beautiful trees. You think you're in New England inin the twenty twenty-two, twenty-three hundred block of South Boulevard, for example, now.

Three hundred of the thirteen hundred trees died. Monoculture of trees planted in the twenties, they're just about all dead now. People go to great expe links to try to save trees and I applaud that but I think sometimes it's not completely thought through.

Cut down three thousand trees, dig up the stump right where it goes because according to the plan, that's where it needs to be, wait six months, plant the tree back.

From 2000 forward, Boulevard Oaks has a perfect street tree plan. I think they're down now maybe to sixteen houses that won't let trees be planted and it's beautiful. And the the we've now moved away to this neighborhood last year and the project is carried on by other people.

They survey the neighborhood every year, see what needs to be done and do it and have planted hundreds of trees on business streets not in the neighborhood, including hundreds of trees on the Southwest Freeway, so it's a spillover from the Boulevard Oaks neighborhood, causing Hugh Rice Kelly over in Southampton to do a similar project which has been done.

And I'll close this part by saying weve moved to Old Braeswood and the numbers here are there are eighteen hundred needed, nine hundred in place, so a deficit of nine hundred trees. We've been here a year and we planted three hundred of them so we've got a good neighborhood effort going here. It's a methodology.

But but by the way, this methodology still just kind of follows a few of us around personally and has never really been captured by the organization Trees for Houston as a module that it can work on. And I I won't explore the whys and wherefores of that, but it's something were still working on.

DT: Let me ask you a question about what happens after a tree is planted and how you work to protect those? And I think it would be interesting to know about the tree ordinance here in town and where that comes from.

And secondly, how you deal with sort of specific threats to trees, whether its traffic or signs or power lines? You know, where there are safety considerations or view considerations and trees get cut back or removed, how have you dealt with those kind of issues?

CS: See if I can briefly answer those. The first question had to do with the ordinance.

I went to a Scenic America meeting, which we'll talk about in minute in a minute, the billboard organization in the eighties and a presentation was made on the Tree Ordinance that had been adopted in Raleigh-Durham and in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And they told about how, in connection with new commercial projects, tree plantings were mandated. By the way, we should note that all over the country, there are areas that have street tree districts or where the Parks Department has a street tree row for example, Madison, Wisconsin.

You play pay a street tree tax, just like here, you you pay a mosquito control district tax and they plant the trees, they plan the trees and the public ethic is that's a city function.

And when we started Trees for Houston, we always intended that this would someday transition into that kind of thing. But it we just have had little or no success in being able to inculcate this kind of a of a of a of a tree ethic into the City Parks Department.

We even have had City Council pass ordinances mandating these things and I think we could say that every parks director and every especially every city forester whos been around all this time just blithely neglects or rejects that.

And so this is not a suca story of success in every possible way. And I think through all of this, whether were talking about trees or billboards or whatever, as Pogo said, we've met the enemy and the enemy is us. And certainly the role of government in these things never ceases to disappoint.

Right now, the trees on Kirby Drive, which have met or are already somewhat mature are now all going to be cut down because the director of public works, with the support of our mayor, believes that the lanes need to be not ten feet wide, I think it is as they've been for the last eighty years, but they all the lanes on Kirby Drive and the resurfacing have to be widened to eleven feet.

And to do that, you have to cut down all the street trees between Buffalo Bayou and University Boulevard. It's just I can't say how disheartening that is or how un-understandable that is.

Concerning so our ordinance that we passed then, I I when I I heard the presentation about the ordinance and I learned that businesses were mandated to plant trees but that the experience had been after three or on a schedule way off into future years,

but that when they and the business community was opposed to it, when they started planting the trees and seeing what it was doing for the community, the businesses through the Chamber of Commerce changed their position completely and decided that this was a good thing and under their sponsorship voluntarily did all the things they were going to be required to do in future years.

I came home and went to see Kristen Harten, who is a city council member. Eleanor Tinsley, as well get into, had become the leader of the sign billboard effort in city government and Kristen was very supportive of that and I suggested to her that she might want to take on the mantle of trees, which she did.

And she then sponsored an ordinance which was much weaker, but nonetheless, patterned after these North Carolina cities. And Hugh Rice Kelly then came forward as the negotiator for the green people, so to speak. And I and I and I sort of bowed out and really didn't have anything to do with that. Hugh just take took it and Kristen took it and ran with it.

We passed an ordinance that basically required or attempted to require the planning of street trees in connection with getting permits for commercial construction and also the planting of hedges around parking lots.

Architects and others tell me if you can just plant a hedge that covers the wheels of cars that you just affect a a sea change inin appearance and I've been suggesting that for fifteen years to the downtown management district and they've started doing it.

And it's really true. I mean, you can take the bleakest old block downtown Houston that has a big old parking lot on it and just put a little hedge around it all and visually transform the feeling of the place.

So that was required. But there were many problems with the ordinance and there was then a subsequent renegotiation of the of the ordinance and it had no tree protection aspects to it.

And so it was subsequently amended, strengthened and and tree protection elements put into it. And now it's yet in a third iteration.

It's interesting that the people in the business community who speaks for the business community? Is it some cracker jack, redneck person who has some little store somewhere whos trying to have no trees to interfere with the visibility of the business and to have signs that'll attract everybody's eye,

oh, you can understand the the the economic motives of that. We can all relate to them. But is that what sets the pace for a community or is the development community that speaks to these topics?

The people who, when you scratch the surface, I find with developers, they're all frustrated architects, they're all frustrated artists, they're all making very fine livings, very successful people. But they also often are people who are deriving a lot of emotional satisfaction from what they do.

And if they speak for your community, you get a totally different kind of a community and, in fact, I think they're the engine, whether were talking about signs which well come to soon or trees. They're the engine for good as I see it.

So the there there are a couple of tensions here I might mention that are ongoing and my positions or thoughts about them are clear. One of these is the question of planting trees or preserving trees.

The future of the greenery of Houston is not so dependant upon our saving the trees that we have, all of which are going to die and have limited life spans, but rather with the planting of trees for the future.

Now tree preservation has a role. I hate to see a nice tree cut down and I think there should be laws against that. But still, what takes the public and focuses its attention is when a tree is cut down. And then there's an analogy in the billboard area that well get to later.

A big beloved tree somewhere is cut down in Lufkin, Texas. Huge energy is generated among the populace of outrage about that and wanting to do something about it. But it's pretty plain that there's nothing you can do because people do not have the ability to take that tree and cause it to be put back in place. It's gone.

So the I think the future of greenery, so to speak, is taking all the passion and energy that's created by those events and turning it into energy to plant trees.

Not far from here, Metro needed to widen a street. There was an ancient tree there. They spent a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars picking up a large, mature live oak tree tree and moving it back ten feet, knowing that it would die. And it died.

But they did so because they felt that public opinion required that they do that. That hundred twenty-five thousand dollars could've been used to plant two hundred fifty trees on streets somewhere. It's the conversion of the what's wrong with that that equation that we need to have to plant trees.

Monoculture and disease. I share concerns. Oak wilt has not come here. Maybe it never will but maybe it will and obviously planting all these live oak trees is is should be a matter of concern if we think that the oak wilt will come and just mow them down as you go down the streets.

At the same time, some people have thought that means we need to have a an oak tree, a plum tree, a cherry tree and and which loses the architectural elements,

which by the way, are in a book by by Hugh Arnold called Trees in Urban Space, which is a, I think, a wonderful explication of the principles by which Trees for Houston and its founders have thought about trees. We actually had those thoughts and then we found some guy who said it all so much better than we did and said so much more. It's all in that book I want to tout.

But we need to think in terms of having different species of trees, but not on the same street. We need to have one street in one tree and another street in another tree.

And yet, the fact remains that on the barren, hostile, sun-baked thoroughfares of the city, the live oak tree and only the live oak tree works in Houston, Texas.

And I if time permitted, we could get in our cars and I could go show you a thousand examples of where trees were other than live oaks were planted in these locations. No tree has been found that will survive.

And the live oak trees, God love them, you can find them near downtown where they're this big around and the cement surrounds them right to the trunk. I don't know how they live on.

David, is there anything else about trees thats burning. I know we're need to move along.

DT: I think we've covered it. I think it'd be good to hear what you have to say about the signs, billboards.

CS: Well, it is the big the bigger issue and the harder one to describe, so I'm going to have to be much more economical in my descriptions.

What happened to Dwight David Eisenhower's proposal not to have billboards on the federal highways? The Federal Highway Administration, under a law that was passed called the Bonus Act, said that any state that did not allow billboards on the on the freeways would receive an extra one percent of highway funding.

I think twenty-six states elected to do that. So when you drive through the United States, you know whether you're in a Bonus state or not. If you're in a Bonus state, there are no billboards on the freeways and if you're not in a Bonus state, there are.

I'm a son of the South, not that I do not share all the values that I inherited from that root. There's much very wrong with that tradition, but much that's right and, at any rate, tha'ts where I come from.

But I have to say that not one Southern state is a Bonus state, not a single one. And Texas isn't one. Also a thing that's little realized is that Texas is the only state in the Union really that has frontage roads.

The original Federal Highway Beautification Act prohibited frontage roads and Sam Rayburn famously overcame that on behalf of Texas and basically, using his political power, forced frontage roads to be permitted

and only Texas it has a a availed itself of the opportunity to have frontage roads with the result it in a way that doesnt exist in any other state roadside I mean, businesses have all moved to the roadways.

My hometown of Orange, when they built Interstate 10, every business in downtown Orange closed and moved out to the Interstate Highway. Downtown Baytown is now located on Interstate 10.

And so it is everywhere you go this in this state, we have all our commercial development along the roadways, which in my mind doesn't make any transportation sense.

Not that the roads create their own traffic as opposed to point to point traffic, but certainly from the point of view of the visual environment, frontage roads are an absolute disaster.

You can get on Interstate 45 and go toward Dallas and you have this jungle of junk and when it ends is exactly the place where the frontage roads end.

But you will also notice on a continuing basis for the last thirty years and I presume for the next thirty years, that at that point, you will see the frontage roads under construction for the next mile or two because that changes the value of the adjacent land dramatically and that change in value creates, shall we say, a political process that results in the construction of of frontage roads.

In 1965, Lady Bird Johnson, who was of course the President's wife, made a plea to her husband to do something to create legislation that would control billboards and junkyard automobile graveyards along federal highways.

And the result was the passage of something called the Federal Highway Beautification Act. If nothing else, it certainly did focus a lot of attention on the question of billboards. Unfortunately, the act that was negotiated was severely flawed in that it basically delegated to to rule making authority.

It required states which, lest they lose ten percent of their federal funding, to pass conforming laws that would say that signs would be con billboards would be controlled this is off premise billboards.

A billboard by that, we mean an off premise sign, a sign that advertises a business that's not on the premise as contrasted with what we would call business signs, which are called on premise signs, which are telling you about a business at that location.

This law only governs off premise signs, which I'm going to call billboards in this conversation.

The the the code basically made what I think is a fundamental a fundamentally wrong took a fundamentally wrong approach.

The theory of it was to restrict billboards to commercial areas and to leave rural areas without billboards. Therefore, it permitted the basically unhampered construction of billboards in urban areas while requiring the removal of the signs in the pristine rural areas.

Well, the fundamental problem with that is the billboards in the rural areas have never been taken down

and, in fact, I guess his name is Harry Reid, the Democratic chairman I'm sorry, leader in the Senate, has become a one-man automaton to create legislation that will make clear that no none of these billboards, quite apart from ever being taken down that were required in 1965 to be taken down and never have been,

but now where they were blown down by the hurricane in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, that they can be rebuilt.

So I mean the perversion of everything we do is is is so is so thorough and the examples of it are so numerous. But the the the suffice it to say the highway bill the Highway Beautification Act hasn't taken down signs and is flawed in its attempt to do so.

The more important point is and I think people whove been opposed to signs have focused excessively on taking signs down where the real dynamic is in what signs are built.

I'll I analogize this to cutting down trees and planting trees. A billboard goes up in a community and huge effort is made by people to try and take that billboard down, which is essentially impossible to do.

The task then of Scenic People is to take that energy and transform it into energy to stop billboards from being built.

In the big picture nationally, all the effort that's been made to take billboards down in America, which has resulted in nothing, has simply distracted attention from the fact that the billboards that have built since 1965 now so overwhelm what was here in 1965 that it would be any billboard control person's dream just to return to what hap what was there in '65.

But the further point is that in 1978, the billboard industry in a in in a breathtaking example of a of a regulated industry turning that into its own device amended the law to say that cities and states could not take billboards down visi that which are visible from federal highways without paying cash compensation to do so.

In forty-nine states, state law had developed that you could require billboards to be taken down by amortization, a very complicated topic we don't have time to get into.

But suffice it to say that that's the only way you can take billboards down and it is prohibited by federal law and that's the principal legacy of the Federal Highway Beautification Act, a law which the billboard industry loves to call a law that works. And it does, it works for them completely.

DT: Can you back up just a little bit and express some of the concerns about having billboards? I mean, it seems like there are lots of reasons not to like billboards, whether it's the visual clutter, but there's also the highway safety issue. Perhaps there's some other reasons that sort of undergird Lady Bird Johnsons worries about billboards and your own.

CS: I think that that this is primarily a a visual pollution or visual environment issue with people who oppose billboards. Yes, people are concerned about the safety aspects of billboards, but that's not the thing that drives it.

What really drives the whole effort is the way they despoil the the view from the road. And as Texas urbanizes I I drove back from Austin yesterday two new billboards in Fayette in Fayette County, where LaGrange is, just right back out in the middle of nowhere. As when when traffic on certain roads reaches a certain point, all of a sudden, boom, boom, boom, here come the billboards.

And I think our polls this is a big issue. Our polls consistently show, everywhere, every time we go, no matter what we ask and we I mean, we have a Baselice study, which is kind of the Republican preferred public opinion polling group so that, I mean, they're business that they could never be seen as being anti-business shows over eighty percent of Texans think there are too many billboards and want to do something about it.

And and by the way, a big theme here is how can eighty-five percent of the population have a view that can never be successfully expressed in the political processes. And we that's a whole nother morning to discuss.

But what are the dynamics about a billboard? William F. Buckley died a couple of days ago and I think he's seen as the person who has best described it in an essay he wrote in 1966, which is in his book, The Jeweler's Eye, which is just a collection of his essays, in which he tried to talk about what is involved.

The fundamental thing that's involved in a billboard is that the billboard is not a use of public proper private property, but is a use of the public property, the public property, the roadway that's been built by the public.

So when people talk about their right to have a sign, he expresses it this way. The right to have a sign is an absolute right in his view and a landowner, as a as an incident to his exercise of his property rights, has an absolute right to put any kind of sign on his property he wants to so long as its not visible from other peoples property.

And he gives the example that a homeowner, if he wished, could construct a porch and then put a full array of signs in the yard facing the porch so he could go out on his porch and be reminded of what deodorant to use and to be reassured that he was buying the right gasoline and all the other things that these signs might tell him and that thats a use of his property and his right.

But that when that sign is then turned around and beamed at his neighbor, he's now using his neighbor's property.

And when that sign is beamed at the roadway, he's now using the public roadway and that the people who pay for the roadway, all of us, the public, the government, have the absolute right not to permit our property to be used to beam these messages onto the roadway.

I know this has been talked about by theorists, economists and others of all stripes over the years. I don't cite William F. Buckley or people of who would be strongly identified with having private property positions, conservative positions in terms of limitation of government and other things. I don't cite them to indicate a preference on my part for their thinking although in fact, I do have such a preference

but rather to say that this this is where I think there would be the greatest tendency for a concern to exist and that even in your most free enterprise, private rights group, the analytical thinkers are clear that we do not have a requirement that we have to look at billboards.

And that it is appropriate if the community, if the public wants to not have billboards, then that is something that we, as a matter of our collective property rights, have the right to do.

DT: How would a billboard opponent respond to a First Amendment claim?

CS: The the law on that topic was set in a case about twenty-five years ago in involving the City of San Diego and basically what the court did was to drdraw a distinction between commercial speech and political speech.

And basically what the court said you have there were like six opinions given in the case and you have to look at the different opinions to see what six people had in common,

but the analysis of the case by everybody is that the pub under Free Speech, the public may, through government, prohibit commercial messages from being beamed onto public roadways,

but that, with respect to political speech, there is a right that exists in a person to express himself and that that right cannot be abrogated. It can be regulated, but not prohibited. So and I think the law has been clear ever since that time in that respect.

I mean, these very issues get litigated over and over and over again, including in Houston where the firm of Sussman, Godfrey, which is a renowned, high powered litigation firm, represented the billboard industry in what I would call a very energetic attack on the Houston sign code based on the idea that it was it was in derogation of Free Speech rights.

And again, the court held, as it always does, that the city cities can do that with respect to commercial speech.

DT: Let's talk a little bit about the codes that you mentioned and about the formation of Billboards Limited, which I guess led to the creation of that sign code in Houston.

CS: One thing that happens is whenever the word billboard appears in the newspaper, efforts to do something about billboards pop up everywhere.

This is an exaggeration, but let's say if in the State of Arkansas, the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce decided billboards are good for Arkansas and they issued a press release that said billboards are good for Arkansas and it got made it into the newspapers. Don't be surprised if in Rogers, Arkansas one week later, somebody's down at City Hall complaining about billboards.

It's just the mention of the medium makes people think about it and a fundamental thing that people traditionally have thought that billboards are like the weather. There's nothing you can talk about it, you can complain about it but there's nothing that you can do about it and people don't have a feeling of empowerment about that.

Oh, I'm sorry, I lost my thread. Back to where we started.

DT: Well, you talked about this sort of philosoph

CS: Yes, I I I know now, exactly. [Speaking at the same time]

CS: I know I know where I'm headed.

The the the conversation that occurred resulting from the passage of the Federal Highway Beautification Act and the proceedings surrounding it in 1965 under the principle I was just saying just was a catalyst for concern to be expressed about billboards everywhere

and the issue just arose everywhere because people heard about it and had the idea that maybe they could do something about it. So it was in Houston.

I was not involved in the founding Billboards Limited. The man who did, Ralph Anderson, is dead, he can't tell you about it but I but I and I and I think Ralph is a great hero and I say a word about it.

The American Institute of Architects held its national convention in Houston in 1965, the very year that this Federal Highway Beautification Act was passed and it was all in the news.

When the AIA meets, the local chapter does whats called a charette. I don't exactly know what that means, but certain kinds of architectural projects are done by the local AIA involving civic or public issues and are then in some way displayed to the people who come to the convention.

Ralph Anderson, a graduate of Rice University and a a principal in a leading architectural firm called Wilson, Morris, Crane and Anderson, designer of the Astrodome, of the Super the Super Drum at the University of Texas in Austin and many other well known buildings around the country, was president of the AIA

and so he set up a charette and asked for five ideas for the betterment of Houston. One was to make the Port of Houston a tourist attraction, as an example, and there were others.

One of the five was to do something about signs, billboards in Houston and so they worked up some ideas and out of that grew the formation of the organization, Billboards Limited.

I was in New Haven, Connecticut at the time, had nothing to do with this, which Ralph started and Ralph was the president and Ralph was the guiding light.

In my experience, more often than not, efforts you find a person who's doing a lot of people do a lot of things, but there's a person who's a catalyst. Ralph was that person and remained that person all his life.

He must've died or in the nineties, I'm thinking. Maybe fifteen years ago.

They thought that they would just make a good reasonable proposal for the control of billboards and all march down to City Hall and the City Council would pass it.

And if you got all the and so many leading citizens and good people all banded together in this organization, including Gerald Hines, a very prominent local developer, who to this day remains a very big booster of sign control.

And they went down to City Hall and they found out there was not one member of the City Council who would even make a motion to do anything about this.

And that then followed the dark years for Billboards Limited, through the rest of the sixties and all through the seventies.

I came here from law school, started practicing law and was joined what was then called the Houston Junior Bar Association, now it's called Young Lawyers. I don't guess Young Lawyers want to be seen as junior anymore.

And I was the program committee chairman and I heard about this and I so I called Ralph and asked if he wanted to come and do a program on Billboards Limited. This is after the effort had failed, the initial effort.

And we held that we had that luncheon, I attended I listened to Ralph and I'm afraid my life is irrevocably changed because very soon Ralph had a had another guy who is thinking about these things and we worked together on these things for years and years and years.

In the seventies, issues arose which we don't have the time to talk about involving the Federal Highway Beautification Act. In fact, the people who opposed billboards in Washington attempted to repeal the whole act.

In other words, its protection of billboards from removal on federal highways was seen vastly to overpower any good that might come of the law in general.

In Texas, we really didn't have anything else and so Ralph and I went to Aus to Dallas to testify in favor of the federal of not repealing the Highway Beautification Act.

We were there and speaking with us were all the representatives of billboard industry. And people from other parts of the country came to speak in favor of the repeal.

And after we had all spoken and expressed a diametrically opposed views, we went to lunch and I don't mean the sign people.

And out of that came our participation in the founding then in 1980 of a national organization, Scenic America, which has as its mission the whole cluster of issues related to the way America looks vis the visual environment, scenic conservation.

When environment got to be a suspect word, we started talking about scenic conversa conservation. Now I hear the word environment again no one's ever quite sure what to call this.

It, like the trees organization I mentioned, Trees for Houston, was for a couple of years kind of like a club. It had no staff, it was just people who were involved in this effort from around the country joining coming together once a year in Washington.

Ultimately funding was found from the Rockefeller family, David Rockefeller the III, I think, is the particular person involved and he did some major funding that permitted the establishment of an office and executive director and Scenic America still exists.

We were just totally in the woods through the seventies and that's when all these billboards in Houston were built, so that by 1980, we had over ten thousand billboards in the city. And were called the Billboard Capital of the World, a term that our local industry reveled in.

Due to the Civil Rights Act, Houston was required to create single member districts and in 1980, an election was held and the city council was expanded from eight people one of whom, an architect named Howard Howard Ford,

I think, it's Har I think Howard's right would come in the middle of the night and say I want you to know I'm for you and if there's ever another person for you, then we'll talk about it. But for now, I have to keep it secret.

And all of a sudden, that city council became a fourteen member city council and a man named Frank Mann, who was a very because I I I revere the word, I hate to call him conservative, but let's say very old fashioned man somebody who was against everything was just absolutely adamant about the virtues of billboards and how wonderful they were.

And the woman, Eleanor Tinsley, who had been involved in CSG, Citizens for Good Schools CGS, I'm sorry. A lovely, refined, wonderful woman ran against Frank Mann and she made billboards a political issue and she beat him.

And six new people came to the Houston city council and voila, we suddenly went from being zero to eight to being eight to seven, having the votes.

And promptly under the leadership of a man named Lance Lalor, who subsequently kind of disappeared from sight, he was a state representative who was elected to the city council and very much acting independently, crafted, introduced, fought for and got passed the 1980 Billboard Law, which fundamentally said this no more billboards could be built in Houston.

It also required the removal of perhaps ten percent of the billboards in the city. Very modest in its takedowns, but it said no new billboards.

David, this topic and and the different laws and the different fights is a difficult one to to in capsule form, I'll try.

The billboard industry immediately went to Austin and got passed a law that basically said the Houston sign code is hereby overridden and void by the Texas legislature

and a couple of people happened to be having dinner with Mark White, then the governor. I mentioned in particular Ray Hankamer and had dinner with him and talked to him about this

and the next day, he vetoed it, saying it was an unwarranted intrusion on local government and the rights of home rule cities.

In 1985, the billboard industry came back. This is a huge lobby. The amount of political money they hand out is staggering.

I remember we were in front we, Scenic America, in front of us one committee in the House of Representatives and and which was considering aa minor billboard manner and they handed out three hundred ninety-five thousand dollars in honorariums to the members of that committee in a thirty day period.

If we if we come back now to the intel intellectual or theoretical side of things, remember, billboards are a use of the roadway, according to to William F. Buckley. They're not a use of the private property.

So that basically means that we're and and billboard companies price their product according to what they call circulation. And circulation like a magazine for them means how many cars go by.

Basically this is a parasite industry that that takes circulation provided by us, the public, and then converts that into a commercial product that can be sold to advertisers

and its whole reason for existence and ability to exist depends upon its ability to continue, parasitically, to use the circulation provided by the government.

So its whole existence depends upon its ability to to garner a public asset for its private use.

It is a multibillion dollar industry. If tomorrow it were deprived of its resource that it doesn't own, our public roadways and the circulation on those public roadways, it would be a zero dollar industry.

Now if you have a multibillion dollar industry and your product is something that you're getting for free and you're getting it from the government, how much money would you spend to ensure the existence and continuation of the availability of that product?

If you're a two billion dollar industry, it's certainly not a hundred thousand dollars, it's not a million dollars, it's not a billion dollars. It's whatever it takes.

I mean, obviously, if the cost of the product became past a certain point, it would affect the end product and the profitability of the business.

But fundamentally, the billboard industry lives by its appropriation of a public asset and, therefore, I and I don't fault them for this, this is how I would run the business. It's how anybody would run the business. But their biggest cost of doing business is government.

That's why yesterday, the Texas Department of Transportation said that you could have LED billboards in Texas.

Forget the fact that nobody who ever talked to them about it wasn't being paid to talk to them about it.

Forget the fact that the political processes of which they're a part have benefited from untold money, according to Lyndon Johnson, the mother's milk of politics, pouring in to support them in every way.

Anybody who's there not being paid to be there is there to be against it.

We can poll the public using the poller who would be the least suspect for our intended audience of any poller we could pick and show that eighty or eighty-five percent of people think something.

But how can that ever fight or counter a multibillion dollar industry that depends and lives off of a public asset that simply siphons off for free?

In in in '85, Lieutenant Governor Hobby, who by the way, he and his wife were very good friends of Ralph Anderson's, but nonetheless, he said I want to compromise.

So the City of Houston went to Austin and they compromised with the billboard industry. The point of no new billboards, never an issue.

And I want to stop right now and say that twenty-eight years later, we don't have ten thousand billboards, we have five thousand and not one billboard has been taken down by authority of law.

The five thousand that have been taken down have been taken down by storms, hurricanes, changing land use patterns, new traffic moving to other roadways and, in a few cases, public spirited citizens, landowners just saying take the billboard down. (misc.)