A City Council panel that found billboards to be a type of pollution plans to clean it up.
The planning and development legislative review committee, made up of four city representatives, voted 3-1 Monday to recommend an ordinance that would completely ban the construction of new billboards in El Paso.
"I feel that prohibition makes a lot of sense," West-Central city Rep. Susie Byrd said in response to comments that the recommendation would hurt businesses. "This is not the planning department versus the business community. This is a quality-of-life issue."
Voting in favor of the ban were Byrd, West Side city Rep. Ann Morgan Lilly and South-West city Rep. Beto O'Rourke.
East Side Rep. Rachel Quintana voted against the recommendation. She said a compromise should have been reached between the city and the billboard industry.
Under the proposed rule change -- which will require a full council vote to become official -- billboard companies would also be required to remove 16 traditional billboards for every single existing billboard they choose to upgrade into a digital billboard.
Conversion to digital billboards would also require approval of council, public hearings and the permission of residents in the vicinity of the electronic billboard.
Other provisions include limiting the number of digital billboards to 15 in the entire city, establishing spacing requirements for billboards of one every two miles along Interstate 10.
"We are disappointed that we spent a whole year negotiating with the city in good faith and then the (committee) chose to disregard that work," said Tim Anderson of Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns 60 to 70 percent of the estimated 700 billboards in El Paso.
Anderson would not comment about what his company would do next in regard to the proposed changes.
Clear Channel and the city had worked on a compromise on billboard construction, which called for the removal of three old billboards for every new one that goes up.
But the committee said that the intention of the city had always been to completely ban new billboards.
The rule change, which will be proposed in two weeks, was opposed by a handful of advertising agencies and the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce. But dozens of neighbors and environmental advocates applauded the committee's decision to recommend a ban on billboards.
"Talk to the people in the street and the people who own homes around this town," Westsider Barbara Walker said. "They will tell you: 'Not in my backyard.' "