45°
The Appellate judges nixed limitations that confine billboards in Englewood to a single business-industrial area while excluding them from a similar zone where a company wants to build a funky V-shaped sign 2 feet high and 44 feet wide.
The panel also eliminated a section of the ordinance that required a “no billboard” sign within 1,000 feet of a residence.
However, the court said Elray Outdoor Corp. couldn’t prove that the size of the billboard would detract from the area’s aesthetic value, as city officials have argued.
Elray wanted to erect the odd sign on a pole rising 20 feet atop a 17-foot-high sound barrier next to the highway’s westbound lane — skirting the southern corner of the city –making it one of the first signs motorists coming off the George Washington Bridge would see.
And although Englewood is often characterized by crime and gentrification, it also has some of the state’s priciest homes. Look no further than the recent dustup over Muammar al-Qaddafi’s scuttled plans to greet visitors in a tent off an exclusive stretch of Palisade Avenue near Route 9W.
Elray argued at a trial in Hackensack that no other town in the region ribboned with highways has a 1,000-foot rule. The ordinance was so restrictive, the company’s lawyers said, that it unconstitutionally banned signage from the light industrial zone.
Although Superior Court Judge Joseph Conte took the city’s side, state Appeals Judges Edith Payne, Alexander Waugh Jr. and Richard Newman saw things differently.
“Englewood has not, in our view, offered a reasonable explanation for its decision to exclude billboards totally from the LI zone,” the judges said, also finding insufficient support for the 1,000-foot requirement.
The higher court did side with the city when it came to the strange billboard, which it said appeared way too high.
“In order for the billboard to be completely visible on I-95 from the proposed location, it must apparently be significantly taller than the sound barrier along the highway, making it taller than the structures already allowed in the LI zone in additional to being taller than the conditional use allows,” the judges said.
“The height and the fact that it is a V-shaped, double sign would cause it to be even more noticeable,” they concluded.
City officials now have to decide what to do not only in court but with their useless ordinance. Elray’s lawyers haven’t publicly committed to a course yet.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
