When  George F. Will speaks, I, for one,  listen.  Will, who lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland has won the Pulitzer Prize for his syndicated newspaper columns. He is a contributing editor of NEWSWEEK and speaks with wit and precision every Sunday morning on ABC television’s “THIS WEEK WITH SAM (Donaldson)AND COKIE (Roberts).” Like his father, George Will has also been a university professor. He speaks with clarity and authority on subjects as diverse as baseball, term limits for office-holders and the value of neo-conservatism to politics and to political thinking.

 I recently found something directly pertinent to Asheville, North Carolina politics in George’s 1994 book, THE LEVELING WIND: POLITICS, THE CULTURE & OTHER NEWS 1990-1994.  This book is the fifth collection of Will’s columns, essays, commencement addresses and similar pieces on subjects which Americans delight to debate. One of the collection’s  subjects, now cannonading off the hills surrounding Asheville, is billboards and how to make billboards do all the things which people want them to do.  Enter George Will with a short May 9, 1991 column called “Coercion Pollution.”

Will’s 1991 column begins with a loving reminiscence of the classic sequence of Burma Shave signs along the roads of yesteryear, “when the world was young and the reforming spirit occasionally took a day off.” Now, however, he writes, tongue in cheek,  America is clearly approaching perfection and “the fine-tuners of life have returned their attention to the Republic’s remaining billboards.”

The billboard industry is said to be losing its battle to stay in business because of the increasingly effective lobbying by the “insufferably noble” advocates of natural beauty. And that lobbying can be fierce. Billboards are often called  “unsightly nuisances,”“visual pollution” and “sensory litter,”  “parasites” and “free riders.”George Will concedes that, other things being equal, “all of us sensitive people would rather see trees than signs.”

The constitutional problem, however,  is that all currently disapproved billboards are where they are because of the approval of earlier local governments. Now that the tide is turning against large signs, the advocates of scenic beauty want the billboards simply to go away at the lowest possible cost to local budgets. The federal government has long since cut back on tossing money into local coffers to pay hard cash to compensate sign board owners.  Raising taxes or cutting local services is a sure way for a local official not to be re-elected. What is a well meaning politician to do? Enter “amortization.” Amortization is nothing more than a grace period during which owners recoup through rentals a sum equal to construction costs.

Will concedes the right of municipalities in the community interest to abolish or limit the size and placement of informational billboards. He does not, however, concede that amortization is a fair or just (albeit eminently affordable) alternative to paying cash compensation on the barrel head. He also suspects an elitist bias against billboards.”Why a sign telling travelers that there is a cheap motel a mile ahead is a ‘nuisance’ to anyone is unclear. Perhaps people who feel that way do not operate or stay at the kind of low-cost motels that get most of their business from millions of non affluent travelers who get their information about inexpensive accommodations from roadsign signs.”

Will agrees with the billboard industry that amortization is confiscation: slow-moving confiscation, but unfair taking of property, nonetheless.

Let me  flesh out  a hint which Will gives of the unfairness of amortization. “Imagine,” he writes, ‘amortizing’ private homes for highway purposes, without compensation.” 

Hold that thought. Normally, a home owner expects to be able to keep his property in his family for generations (if you doubt that, look at the history of home-owning in Montreat, NC) so long as the property taxes are paid on time. Imagine a house which has been in a family for 80 years and three generations. Its initial cost was $1,000 and over the years has has $99,000 in additions and repairs. Its fair market value is now $200,000. But what if Buncombe County or Asheville wants the property to build a road or for a public trash dump or to  achieve some other legitimate public purpose? 

Unpleasant but fair, provided that the local authority pays the homeowner the fair market value of $200,000. The county or city, to save money, might, however, argue instead: “After 80 years you have got far more from that property than you ever put into it. So we owe you nothing. Or maybe, because we are such good guys, we will give you two full years more before you have to hit the road. That is more than you deserve. But we are merciful.” In effect that is the way Asheville city government wants to make billboards go away: on the cheap.

 Feel free to do your own mental experiment of how public authority might seize your automobile or your business and compensate you through amortization rather than money.  You would not like the results one bit. Neither do billboard owners.

Doe this make you empathize with billboard owners? If so, thank George F. Will for the insight. As usual, George cuts through the smoke and underbrush to the core of many tough issues now alive in national and local public arenas.
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