The History on Billboards

Missouri set restrictions on billboards – size, distance between billboards and where they could be built based on zoning – in 1968 in response to 1965’s Federal Highway Beautification Act. The act called for control of outdoor advertising along the nation’s interstate and federal-aid primary systems.

The federal-aid primary system includes most major routes, both inside and outside cities. Federal-aid primaries used federal funds for construction and includes, for example, Highway 65 and Glenstone Avenue, which is also Business Route 65.

Bill May, executive director of Springfield-based Missouri Outdoor Advertising Association, said there are about 9,500 billboards along Missouri’s interstates and federal-aid primaries, with only a few hundred standing alongside unregulated roadways.

The 1968 state regulations were tightened in 1999 and again in 2002, even though federal regulations hadn’t changed. May said Missouri’s billboard owners agreed to tighter regulations because they grew weary of an expensive and long-running fight with anti-billboard groups.

In 2000, a political action committee that included St. Louis-based Scenic Missouri collected enough signatures to put an initiative before voters that would have prohibited the construction of any new billboards, according to Scenic Missouri Executive Director John Regenbogen. The measure passed in Greene and Christian counties but was defeated statewide.

Missouri law dictates billboards can’t be larger than 800 square feet and can’t be closer than 1,400 feet to other billboards. Billboards also must be within 750 feet of commercial or industrial activity and be on property that’s zoned for those uses.

Billboards that were legally built but don’t now conform to regulations are classified as “nonconforming,” meaning they can remain in place, but they can’t be moved and they can’t be structurally altered.

May estimates that 98 percent of billboards statewide are nonconforming.