Broadway billboards receive temporary stay
Advertisers like site, but real estate company says it hurts development
Lori Coolican, The StarPhoenix
Published: Tuesday, May 29, 2007
One company's eyesore is another's art form.
That uncomfortable fact confronted city councillors Monday night as an advertising firm and a real estate developer clashed over the two large billboards that have greeted motorists and pedestrians at the base of the Broadway Bridge for a generation.
"These signs and the adjoining fence . . . have a negative impact on our plans. It affects our site right at this point in time. You can't see what's going on," ICS Real Estate partner Ron Ritchie told city councillors in a brief presentation urging them to stick to a plan to bring the billboards down by June 1.
Ritchie said
the real estate investment company is in discussions with a potential buyer for land it owns adjacent to the signs, but he would not discuss details such as how soon development might actually get underway.
ICS has wanted the billboards and the fence behind them removed since last year, Ritchie said.
"The signs currently block any visibility to and from our site and are detrimental to our proposed marketing of the site and our future development plans," he wrote in a May 11 letter to city council.
"As well, in our opinion this signage is unsightly given the proposed streetscape and the beautiful riverbank in downtown Saskatoon." Ritchie told council he'd expect widespread opposition if similar billboards were ever proposed near the other downtown bridges. His company has advertised on billboards, but they don't belong on the riverbank, he said.
"There are lots of locations that are high traf- fic and more business-oriented." CBS Outdoor, which owns the two billboards and has operated them for 70 years, received a one-year extension of its licensing agreement from the city last year, allowing it to continue using the space until June 1.
The city's infrastructure department told the company at the time that due to uncertainty about development of city-owned or privatelyowned land at the site, the city would not be able to extend the lease any longer.
Council voted on Monday night to accept an offer from CBS Outdoor for a month-to-month agreement to keep the signs in place as long as possible -- for 60 per cent more money. The company currently pays the city $3,000 a year for the spot and offered to fork over $4,800 a year, paid monthly in advance.
The city itself might need the billboards removed by November to make way for redevelopment of the streetscape along 19th Street as part of River Landing, infrastructure manager Murray Totland told council.
Local businesses that have long gotten a bang for their advertising buck at that location sent a flurry of supportive letters to CBS Outdoor in early May. Copies of the letters were passed on by the company and formed part of Monday night's city council agenda.
Leslie Bell, who operates a self-named local marketing company, went so far as to argue in her letter that the billboards "provide a colourful and interesting example of art -- in a commercial art form." Wilson's Greenhouse and Garden Centre marks every spring with advertising on one of the contentious billboards. The sign at the base of the Broadway Bridge is "an integral part of our marketing scheme," general manager Steve Wilson wrote.
Off Broadway Theatrical Productions has also booked one of the billboards for numerous ads over the remainder of 2007. In a letter to the advertising company, Off Broadway president Peter Kooy said the theatre has found it to be one of the best locations in town for catching the eyes of locals and tourists.
In fact, it "gives our business more exposure than any other method of advertising," he wrote.
For city council to order the billboard removed without ICR presenting any solid plans for the adjacent land "would reduce my faith in the support the city has for its local merchants," Kooy wrote.
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...hidden in a story about a feud over billboards is a delicious tidbit of news that we at the Saskatoon Constructions thread desperately gobble up! A potential sale of property at the bottom of the Broadway?!? Oooh!
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