Opinion ID: 1974568
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: I-A The Federal Statute. [1]

Text: In 1965 Congress passed the Highway Beautification Act to control and limit the erection and maintenance of outdoor advertising signs along interstate and primary roadway systems. To induce individual states to adopt equivalent, or more restrictive, standards the statute utilized a central strategy of conditioning a state's allocation of federal-aid highway funds upon the state's compliance with minimal highway beautification standards prescribed in the federal statute and herein referred to as effective control. A state's failure to act with such effective control by a specified date resulted in a 10% penalty assessed against the state's share of federal-aid highway funds. State of Vermont v. Brinegar, 379 F.Supp. 606 (D.C.Vt.1974). See generally, Cunningham, Billboard Control Under the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, 71 Mich.L.Rev. 1310 (1973). The effective control concept encompassed both substantive standards governing the type, size, and permissible location of roadway signs, and procedural standards to guide states in implementing the new outdoor advertising controls. In this appeal we are principally concerned with the procedural standards  in particular, the extent of the federal mandate for payment of just compensation to signowners. Section 131(g) of the federal statute required that just compensation be paid to signowners for removal of certain classes of signs. In addition, § 131(g) provided that the federal government would reimburse the states for 75% of the cost incurred in compensating for the removal of these signs. Federal assistance was unavailable, and federal standards did not require payment of just compensation, for the removal of signs erected lawfully (according to state law) in a so-called hiatus period extending from October 22, 1965 to January 1, 1968. In our prior opinion in this case, we explained that § 131(g) did not create in any signowner a federal right to receive just compensation for the elimination of any sign, regardless of whether it fell within the class specified in § 131(g). Rather, if a state saw fit to refrain from paying just compensation for a sign for which § 131(g) required such payment, the state ran the risk of incurring the 10% penalty against its federal-aid highway funds allocation. See State of Maine v. National Advertising Company, supra, at 748; see also State of Vermont v. Brinegar, supra ; and Markham Advertising Company v. State of Washington, 73 Wash.2d 405, 439 P.2d 248 (1968). Section 131(g)'s provision for just compensation to signowners for removal of a limited class of signs was amended in 1975 to require payment of compensation for all signs lawfully erected under state law. The effect of this amendment upon the signs here in question is discussed in part II-B of this opinion, infra. Thus, the payment scheme, as well as the timetable for removal, became essential features of the effective control states were federally required to implement by January 1, 1968. After the enactment of the federal statute the State of Maine, through the commission, entered into an agreement with the Secretary of Commerce (whose duties in this matter were later assumed by the Secretary of Transportation) whereby Maine adopted (and the Secretary approved of) controls for the regulation of outdoor advertising. [2] This agreement was ratified, and expanded upon, by the Maine Legislature in its enactment of the Maine Outdoor Advertising Act. See State v. National Advertising Company, supra, at 747.