Signs and Billboards Bylaw Reform Has No Mandate

13 March 2007

Media Release

Auckland City’s Signs and Billboards Bylaw Reform Has No Public Mandate

Analysis of Auckland City’s “Signs Complaints Register” confirms that the Council’s campaign to reform signs and billboards is a farce.

The campaign:

- Wasn’t driven by any need to bring the industry under tighter control

- Wasn’t driven by a concerned public making lots of complaints.

Instead, a look at the complaints register shows very clearly that the campaign has been generated by ‘a pet hate of signs and billboards’ among a small group within the Council, said Michael Barnett, Auckland Chamber of Commerce chief executive and convenor to 26 business organisations whose submission requests the bylaw be withdrawn.

Of 1822 complaints the Council received on signage in the City between 2004 and March this year, 1459 or 75% had nothing to do with the bylaws on business signs and billboards. Instead they were complaints about real estate, sandwich boards, traffic signs, election hoardings and other matters.

Business sign bylaw complaints totalled just 153 over three years or 8% of all complaints.

In contrast, 24% of complaints were about real estate signs, 20% about sandwich boards, 7% about election hoardings, and 6% about traffic signs – areas of signage that are mainly excluded from the review.

In a breakdown of the 153 of complaints about business sign bylaws, or 8% of total complaints, it transpires that a proportion of these have nothing to do with business signs, but relate to other types of signs such as billboards.

Reinforcing the farcical nature of the bylaw reform, billboards are statistically unrecorded in the register and there are hardly any complaints against them, yet a major part of the reform proposal seeks to eliminate more than 400 billboards from the City.

Also, it is a myth that there is a large volume of complaints about the City’s signage of any type. The City’s complaints’ register, obtained under the Official Information Act, shows the total number of complaints grouped into nine categories run at about 600 per year and in a City with a population of 405,000 is statistically insignificant (0.2% per year).

The overwhelming majority of business sign complaints were on specific matters that the complainant wanted fixed, and were not a challenge about the bylaws themselves; for example:

- A complaint about a sign bolted to a lamp post (8/3/2006).

- Bible meeting sign swinging from a Pohutukawa tree (9/6/2006).

- Car firms banner over hanging a footpath (25/8 2006).

- “Buy Your Home Now ph 0800”….attached to a power pole (4/5/2004).

Very clearly, the City’s own complaints register shows the folly of the bylaw reform campaign and of spending ratepayer funds and council time to address a supposed problem that analysis of Councils own data shows doesn’t exist.

The key point in the submission of the Chamber of Commerce and the other 26 business organisations which joined with it says it all:

- The existing bylaws are adequate to do the job, and what’s missing is effective policing by the Council.

The Chamber Group of submitters strongly urges Council to stop the hearing process and withdraw the proposed bylaw, and instead start to work with the industry and Mainstreet business organisations to effectively police the existing bylaws.

Other reasons for this suggestion include the huge expense and time which businesses – many small-medium with limited resources – are being forced to undergo to defend their basic property rights against a bylaw proposal that has no community mandate and is anti-business to its core.

The latest suggestion of a dual hearings process by a committee who have already backed the reforms and a second committee led by the Mayor reinforces how farcical the campaign has become, said Mr Barnett.

If the City’s complaints register had confirmed that there is a widespread concern with the signs and billboards around the City, then there might be some justification for a bylaw change.

The fact that the register shows the opposite is the case should be enough for the City’s leaders to call an immediate halt to the farce – leadership is also about admitting to mistakes and having the courage to front up.

ENDS

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