07-12-07 Planning Comm. Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

Home Browse Search

Meeting of June 14, 2007 Page 12 Subject: Dynamic Signs Foundation itself and the International Sign Association (whose mottos is "supporting, improving, and promoting the sign industry."). • The only state agency document that he provided was not the result of a study in any ordinary sense of the term. It is thetwo-page MNDOT internal technical memorandum that the plaintiff in the pending litigation tried and failed to rely upon in seeking an order allowing it to resume using a dynamic display with an eight-second interval. It reflects simply the application of a formula for applying state billboard spacing requirements in the context of digital displays. On pages 8-9 of his January ruling, Judge Zimmerman explained the very limited significance of that document. Moreover, Scott Robinson of MNDOT has explained to the City's consultants that the memo is not a Mn/DOT policy, statute or rule, but rather it was written to provide internal guidance. :• Mr. Brown also provided two studies commissioned by the sign industry itself. The first was a study performed for the Outdoor Advertising Association's own foundation, The Foundation for Outdoor Advertising Research and Education, by Suzanne Lee and others at Virginia Tech entitled "Driving Performance in the Presence and Absence of Billboards." The second was "An Examination of the Relationship Between Signs and Traffic Safety," performed by a private consulting firm for the foundation of the United States Sign Council. Neither study focused on digital displays or the special issues that digital displays present. Moreover, the Lee study has been subjected to an extraordinary level of judicial criticism. When rejecting the Lee study's conclusions regarding the supposed absence of a relationship between billboards and traffic safety, a federal judge found that the Lee study "is so infected by industry bias as to lack credibility and reliability." Nichols Media v. Town of Babylon, 365 F.Supp.2d 295, 308 (N.D.N.Y. 2005). Following a full trial in which Ms. Lee was cross-examined regarding the report, the court held that "this conclusion is supported not only by industry involvement in the design and execution of the study but also by the lack of peer review and the fact that there is no other scientific study with the same or similar conclusions regarding driver distraction." Id. Even if the information in the Tantala Group report were more relevant to digital displays, its genesis has much in common with the Lee study. According to the website of the United States Sign Council "if you're in the sign business, USSC is for you ....USSC is managed by signpeople for the benefit of signpeople." 4• Mr. Brown's email also includes a quotation from a "Professor Taylor" at Villanova University, in which he stated that ""there appears to be 12-