Billboard debate continues

Chief Gibby Jacobs (Billboard Facts, North Shore Outlook, Oct. 29) continues to confound me with his assertions that opposition to the Squamish billboard plan is overblown and is riddled with “inaccuracies and gross exaggeration.”

The Squamish leader continues to chant the usual scripts supplied by the billboard industry – that we should be grateful that the original plan of 28 boards has been reduced to six and that “emergency” community messaging will be broadcast for free.

This is no bargain.

Chief Jacobs purports that the plan was subject to a thorough scrutiny by the federal government and that there was no evidence presented which showed any causal relationship between digital billboards and traffic safety.

Here’s what their traffic safety expert declared in their Environmental Assessment Report; “...copious research has found that (billboard) signs often improve driver safety, by “waking” up tired drivers.”

Really? Dr. John Lee of the University of Wisconsin stated one month ago at the Safety Summit in Washington, DC: “nearly every empirical study undertaken since 1995...has demonstrated that there is an adverse relationship between distraction and digital billboards.”

US Federal and state courts have long cited traffic safety as a legitimate basis for billboard regulation.

At the same Safety Summit, Scenic America President Mary Tracey declared that “scientific evidence has confirmed the intuitive notion that digital billboards pose an unnecessary safety risk to drivers.”

We agree. Those are the facts.

Wayne Hunter, Chair Citizens for Responsible Outdoor Advertising

Rafe Mair responds

Re: Usual suspects in the salmon crisis (B.C. Views, Oct. 28, posted at northshoreoutlook.com).

Tom Fletcher describes my opposition to salmon farms and run-of-river power projects as “bunk.”

I realize that he is a right-winger with a right-wing paper but surely that doesn’t exempt him from telling the whole truth.

Regarding fish farms, does he not know that the run of pinks that was abundant this year passed fallowed fish farms when they migrated as smolts, and that this return confirms Alexandra Morton’s findings?

That this was an experiment that proved the point of every private scientist who has examined this issue?

Regarding run-of-river, how can he ignore that fact that the bulk of the private power is to be exported if only because it’s produced when BC Hydro doesn’t need it?

How can BC Hydro give take-or-pay contracts with private power companies at double the amount they can sell it for on the export market?

Regarding his earlier description of the Bute Inlet project hearing in Campbell River at which I spoke, how extraordinary of him to object to the word “shit.”

Even more extraordinary was his failure to observe that the crowd was angry because they had no opportunity – and indeed had never had – to deal with the “merits” but were confined to the “terms of reference” for an environmental assessment of a project they didn’t want.

Does he have no concern for the environmental havoc private power projects wreak?

Rafe Mair

Lions Bay