Kansas City has a long and distinguished tradition of being concerned with its civic beauty and aesthetic presence.

The boulevard and parks system, great civic gestures like Union Station and Liberty Memorial, our Civic Center and, of course, the incomparable Country Club Plaza and the many graceful planned residential districts throughout the city all contribute to a beautiful urban ambiance. And we are the City of Fountains.

But our permissive attitude about signage – particularly billboards, is inconsistent with our aesthetic and planning traditions. We have failed to address this elementary form of disorder and blight, and it diminishes our other achievements. We now have a unique chance to correct that.

In response to public pressure because of some particularly egregious, but legal, recent billboard placements, the city of Kansas City, with the assistance of seasoned consultants, is reviewing our sign ordinance.

Soon, the conclusions and recommendations for a revised sign ordinance will come before the Plan Commission for review and then approval by the City Council. A sign ordinance is necessarily complex. But in one area – free-standing outdoor off-premises advertising, or billboards – the revisions can be completely simple and straightforward. We simply should prohibit, as thousands of American cities and towns have done, any further billboard construction.

The consultant has reviewed sign ordinances in 13 U.S. cities of comparable size, including Dallas, Cincinnati, St. Louis and our suburbs. He concluded that Kansas City’s ordinance is the most lenient and generous of all these cities.

Prohibiting more billboards will be a hardship on no one; we hae enough signs already, and the value of existing signs will simply increase over time.

This position does not advocate removal of existing billboards and does not address on-premises signage. It does recommend that all existing billboards become legal, nonconforming uses. It does recommend regulating off-premises advertising to the fullest extent allowed by Missouri law, thus a complete prohibition of new billboards on city streets, and stringent regulation of size and spacing along federal highways.

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Tom Nelson is a Kansas City architect and a former chairman of the Kansas City Planning Commission. He lives in Kansas City.