The City of San Antonio will once again allow businesses to have on-premise digital signs on a stretch of Interstate 10 running from UTSA Boulevard to Boerne Stage Road.
That part of the city, designated for zoning purposes as the Hill Country Gateway Corridor, was singled out for special signage rules in 2003, while also requiring certain building setbacks, materials and landscaping. Those protections were expanded in 2015, after then-Councilman Ron Nirenberg requested a study to assess visual clutter amid the area’s rapid growth.
The Zoning Commission at the time agreed that “extremely intense” development in the area warranted a change, and the City Council approved a complete prohibition on digital signs along the corridor.
“When they threw that ordinance in, I-10 was nothing but ranch land,” said Lydell Toye, owner of New Braunfels-based US Signs, who requested the city lift its 2015 ban on digital signs.”Now there’s major development. All you see is strip centers and car dealerships on I-10, so having no digital signs out there doesn’t make any sense.”
On Thursday, the City Council, including Nirenberg, voted unanimously to restore an allowance for on-premise digital signs in the area. New digital billboards still will be prohibited in the Hill Country Gateway Corridor, as well as several other protected areas.
“In 2003 the [corridor] was created and it created a bunch of standards, [but] signs and digital signs were still allowed,” said Michael Shannon, director of the city’s Development Services Department.
“Due to today’s change, they will be now allowed similar to the 2003 version of the standards, which makes sense,” he said.
That’s welcome news to sign makers and some business owners who’ve been pushing for the change, but frustrating to some residents and environmentalists who say the area doesn’t need any more visual clutter.
Toye’s company makes digital signs that he sells to businesses for a minimum of $50,000. He’s worked closely with the city on many sign policies, and said he’s happy with the code update, even though it requires new digital signs in the corridor be 25% smaller than the static sign they replace.
“We just wanted to have the opportunity to be able to sell them,” he said.
Neighborhood leaders and environmental advocates involved in the process complain the city handed over the zoning reins to industry leaders, cutting residents out of the process.
Thursday’s change was part of a much broader plan to update the city’s sign code — a task the city delegates to its Building-Related and Fire Codes Appeals and Advisory Board.
That board is made up primarily of industry leaders, who appointed members representing the San Antonio Apartment Association, the San Antonio Sign Association and Greater San Antonio Builders Association to its sign code committee.
The sign code committee also included four community members who applied to participate in the process: Tier One Neighborhood Coalition member Bianca Maldonado, Northside Neighborhoods for Organized Development Member Colleen Waguespack, former Conservation Society of San Antonio President Patti Zaiontz and real estate developer Greg Mann.
Community representatives didn’t get to vote on the committee’s proposed changes, which were approved by the board. The city’s Development Services Department held two public input meetings about the idea of again allowing digital signs in the Hill Country Gateway Corridor, according to Zoning Commission meeting minutes, but Maldonado said few residents showed up to discuss the issue.
“While we’re the stakeholders, we were overruled by industry representatives,” said Maldonado, who along with Waguespack and Zaiontz sought to maintain the corridor’s on-premise sign ban.
The city’s Zoning Commission heard the proposed changes in April, and sided with the the community representatives.
It recommended that City Council reject the provision permitting on-site digital signs in the Hill Country Gateway Corridor, instead favoring a plan that would maintain the ban going forward, but make allowances for some on-premise digital signs that the city had mistakenly permitted after the ban was put in place.
Toye said that oversight by the city was a perfect example of why it should overturn the old digital sign ban altogether. Industry leaders weren’t informed about the 2015 changes, he said, and the city hadn’t been enforcing the rule consistently anyway.
On Thursday city staff presented a plan recommending council members accept the board’s sign code changes without the Zoning Commission’s exception for the Hill Country Gateway Corridor.
“Lying between the two of the city’s largest natural area parks … the corridor serves to highlight the area’s unique character by reducing visual clutter,” Waguespack said at the council meeting. “… Please vote against removing the ban.”
Only one council member, John Courage (D9), expressed concern about the overall sign code update. None brought up the change to on-premise signs in the corridor.
Courage, along with the rest of the council, was focused on a different change in the code update that would reduce the number of billboards citywide. It does so by allowing 24 new digital billboards to be erected in exchange for the removal of four times as many traditional billboards.
While most members of the council supported that idea, Courage sought to amend the plan to cut out the allowance of new digital billboards, citing concerns about driver distractions in congested areas. His amendment failed.
Nirenberg asked city staff to direct billboard removal at areas that currently have the most sign density. His office declined to comment on the renewed allowance of on-site digital signage in the corridor he previously sought to protect.
