10-story ‘mini-house’ billboards would blight Miami’s core

Imagine 10-story-tall digital billboards with illuminated ads front and back changing every eight seconds, each triple the size of the largest standard expressway billboard. Now imagine them spread all over downtown Miami.

That’s what the Miami City Commission approved on a first vote last week, with the aim of changing the city’s own approval requirements based on state law to expedite this travesty.

I am not making this up. I wish I were.

Two weeks ago, looking at a far-less-noxious proposal by Commissioner Joe Carollo, I asked in a headline “Are city commissioners desperate, insensitive or greedy?” That is no longer a question but a statement.

Mr. Carollo had sought lighted digital billboards up to 400 square feet in the city’s three prime waterfront parks. While his proposal still awaits a final commission approval, a new effort by Alex Diaz de la Portilla ups the ante in every way, allowing unlimited billboard locations in every government-owned site in Miami’s urban core, including museums, the Arsht Center, Bayside, the marina, and everything else that government owns, including county-owned sites.

The legislation specifies signs could be up to 100 feet tall and have 1,800 square feet of images – with ads on front and back changing every eight seconds 24 hours a day. Any of those billboards could be 60 feet long and 30 feet high, standing up to 100 feet above downtown.

One national billboard advertising company says its largest standard sign for maximum highway visibility is 672 square feet, 14 feet high by 48 feet long – you know, those mammoth signs that clutter your highway drives. Multiply that by three and you’ll see how gigantic this threat is.

According to the legislation, the city would collect from $48,000 a year for the smallest sign to $432,000 a year for the largest. This public sellout would come as the city is awash in taxes and just raised the general fund budget more than 10%, hiring more employees rather than cutting taxes sharply in one of the poorer cities in the nation.

The Diaz de la Portilla legislation would erase the city’s need to comply with county regulations that now limit such signs to locations along expressways. If this passes, the sky is literally the limit for illuminated billboards not only in the center of the city but, it seems, on Watson Island as well.

Only one commissioner even mentioned the impact before a 4-1 yes vote.

“This opens every single city property for one of those signs,” Manolo Reyes said heatedly before voting against visual clutter on the grandest of scales.

“Any park could have one.”

Actually, any city park could have multiple signs, because there is no limit in the Diaz de la Portilla plan – Mr. Carollo’s less ambitious proposal would limit the signs to space them out every 1,000 feet. There is no such limitation in number or proximity in the Diaz de la Portilla rape of the landscape.

As Mr. Reyes said, “they look like mini houses. I don’t want to see [them on] every city property. I asked last week ‘are we going to become Las Vegas or Times Square and how is this going to affect the residents of the city?’”

Mr. Reyes then sought specifics of signage placement and sizes. “We are here for the residents, and if we are going to make money affecting the residents, I don’t want that money…. We have to be very careful about the long-term effect of this ordinance.”

That’s absolutely correct. Nobody mentioned it, but Miami has always depended on outside visitors – more than 40 million air passengers yearly before covid – and then some of those visitors buying residences, bringing businesses here and building the taxes that commissioners then spend. You would think they might have noted that. Massive illuminated billboards do not attract tourists or businesses or jobs any more than they serve the residents.

Commissioners did not discuss that. Nor, other than Mr. Reyes, did they mention quality of life. That does not appear to be a municipal concern.
Their only concern was how could they make the appointed Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board expedite humongous billboards rather than slow the commission steamroller down by looking at the billboards’ true impact.

Commissioners finally decided that they will limit the board to 15 days to act or call it a rejection by the board, in which case the commission would immediately overrule the objection and pass the law. They plan new legislation this month to hamstring the board not just over signs but in everything it does.

The legal fix thus being in, the only protection for the public and the visual environment would be a veto of the billboard apocalypse legislation by Mayor Francis Suarez, were he willing to stand up to a runaway commission when he has bigger things than Miami in his sights.

On the commission, Mr. Reyes has shown backbone. Will the mayor?