Burnt Orange Report

Texan of the Year Sighting

By Karl-Thomas Musselman

After posting on the Blogosphere's first Texan of the Year, Carter Casteel, it was nice to see today that she's continuing the fight for rural rights, by granting counties more rights to regulate their landscapes from the onslaught of billboards.

[Comal County] Commissioner Jan Kennady said she is setting up a meeting with Rep. Carter Casteel, R-New Braunfels, to discuss ways to keep Comal County from being overrun with billboards...

Casteel said she has gotten more telephone calls about the new signs on Texas 46 than any issue other than school finance.

"It has incensed people," she said. "There are so many it's a complete blighting of the landscape."

Casteel said she wants to balance property rights concerns with the desire to "have a beautiful environment" and said the billboard industry should play a role in any legislation, but she will definitely support a bill to give more local control on regulating outdoor signs.

She sponsored a bill in the last regular session, which passed, banning new billboards in Bandera County.

"The community got very united about two years ago about prohibiting new ones," Casteel said. "We were able to get that done."

You may think this is silly, but as the Austin Metro region grows, I-35 and many of the major transportation feeders in the Hill County counties are becoming the prime targets for billboard growth. And for many of these cities, Fredericksburg is a perfect example, sign ordinances are a huge local issue. In these cases, it's a brand of conservative environmentalism (what used to be conservation) which puts the landscape above the corporate bottom line.