Lamar Advertising, one of the largest billboard companies in the United States, has for years pushed beyond simply selling ad space. Its actions suggest a pattern of corrupt or shady influence over local governments, suppression of dissenting speech, and environmental damage, all in pursuit of profit and power. What follows is a critical examination of this behavior.
Undermining Local Democracy and Safety
Lamar’s financial success depends on how permissive local ordinances are regarding size, brightness, location, and digital conversion of billboards. Rather than adapting to rules, Lamar has often worked to change them through political pressure, lawsuits, campaign contributions, or deals with city officials.
California’s appellate courts have repeatedly rejected Lamar’s attempts to evade permitting and zoning requirements. In one noteworthy case, a billboard in Los Angeles County was destroyed in a windstorm. Lamar rebuilt it without seeking the required permit, claiming ongoing rights. The court found that the destruction severed its “nonconforming” status, meaning Lamar was required to comply with local zoning law, not just rebuild by its own rules.
These fights are not academic. When billboards violate safety norms, being oversized, poorly lit, or sited too close to roads, they increase driver distraction, obstruct visibility, or violate aesthetic or environmental regulations. Local governments or state courts have upheld regulations designed to protect safety and the public view even as Lamar resists. Some regulations forbidding new digital billboards or off-site advertisements have been held constitutional when challenged in court.
Behind these legal battles, critics accuse Lamar of corrupt political influence: backing favorable candidates, pushing for loophole-friendly rules, and entering settlements that allow Lamar vastly more exposure than the average citizen might accept.
Ideological Censorship and the Role of Executives
One of the more troubling dimensions is Lamar’s gatekeeping over content, especially where political, religious, or ideological views come into play. Internal practices reveal that decisions are sometimes based not on legal or technical standards, but on executives’ personal beliefs.
The case of Satanic Temple, Inc. v. Lamar Advertising (Arkansas) alleged that Lamar rejected designs submitted by The Satanic Temple not because they violated “community standards,” but due to religious discrimination and dislike of viewpoints inconsistent with Christian or majority values. In internal communications, Hal Kilshaw, Lamar’s Vice President of Government Relations, is alleged to have declared the ads “misleading and offensive so no on all of them.” The lawsuit asserts that this represents not merely editorial discretion but viewpoint discrimination and breach of both contract and state anti-discrimination law.
Another example came in Boise, Idaho, when a billboard with the message “Imagine No Religion” was refused ad space by Lamar. That phrase echoed atheist or secular viewpoints. While Lamar eventually removed a provocative billboard in Boise after public backlash, the exclusion of atheist content raises serious First Amendment concerns, especially when acceptance or rejection is inconsistent and appears to hinge on ideology.
These are not isolated controversies but suggest a pattern: Lamar executives asserting personal or ideological views in decisions about what speech gets suppressed. When a major billboard company takes on the role of censor or gatekeeper for public political, religious, or social speech, it is a dangerous meld of private power and public consequence.
Environmental Damage and Illegal Tree Removal
Profit motives have also led Lamar to break environmental laws and property rights in order to maximize billboard visibility.
A whistleblower case in Florida revealed that Lamar employees were instructed to trespass on private property and poison or cut down trees that obscured billboards. One deposition describes workers carrying poison in unmarked trucks, cutting limbs at night, or using machetes. These were not spontaneous acts, but allegedly part of directed policy by regional managers.
In Connecticut, Lamar and a tree service were found liable for illegally removing 83 trees on state land along an interstate highway, including sizeable oak, spruce, maple, and birch trees. The Attorney General described the act as obliterating an environmental buffer meant to protect homes. Lamar was ordered to fund a replanting program.
An Ohio couple sued Lamar after 34 trees on their property were cut without permission, and Lamar was forced to pay damages.
Even in Providence, Rhode Island, Lamar subcontractors bulldozed trees on a city-owned embankment leased by Lamar, far beyond what was approved or communicated with city foresters. The city forced Lamar to replant 109 native trees and pay an extra amount to the city’s tree planting fund. The damage was done already.
These cases illustrate that Lamar has placed financial gain over environmental protection, violating both property rights and public safety norms. Trees serve multiple public goods: reducing noise, cleaning air, reducing erosion, and providing shade, especially in poorer neighborhoods with less canopy. Removing them without proper permitting or oversight aggravates health, environmental, and social justice inequities.
Corruption, Influence, and the Erosion of Oversight
Although direct findings of criminal corruption against Lamar, such as bribery, are less well documented in public records, its pattern of influence raises red flags about how private interests capture public regulation.
By giving free billboard space to candidates favorable to Lamar during fights over digital billboard laws, by pushing for campaigns to weaken sign ordinances, by litigating aggressively to overturn or avoid regulation, and by rejecting billboard content based on what appears to be ideological dislike, Lamar operates like a political actor more than a business.
The company seems to exploit the slow pace of local government, weak enforcement, unclear ordinances, underfunded oversight bodies, and the opacity of content-approval decisions. This gives Lamar huge leverage: it gets favorable changes in local rules, sometimes quietly or behind closed doors, while communities suffer from aesthetic blight, traffic safety risks, and environmental damage.
In Providence, the “mistaken” removal of highway buffer trees was combined with verbal approvals and misunderstandings, a situation in which verbal permissions substitute for clear, enforceable permits. That vagueness can be used, intentionally or not, as cover for overreach.
In Arkansas, the alleged discriminatory content rejections suggest a corporate policy guided not by neutral standards but subjective ideology, when internal communications show disdain for certain viewpoints. That opens Lamar up to both legal liability and ethical condemnation.
First Amendment and Contractual Hypocrisy
Lamar’s written policies often assert neutrality: rejecting ads based on misleading or illegal content, or “community standards,” but not on viewpoint. The company claims it does not reject based on agreement or disagreement with the views expressed. But the Satanic Temple lawsuit alleges that in practice, the company rejects content because it disagrees with the viewpoint, especially more unconventional or non-Christian ones. This discrepancy between policy and practice can be legally and morally dangerous.
Private companies are not state actors, so in many legal settings they can decide what ads to display. But when they control essential public speech infrastructure like billboards, when their decisions intersect with elections, public safety, zoning, and when they influence local laws, their power becomes quasi-governmental. At that point, norms like neutrality, transparency, and fairness should bind them more strictly. When they fail to do so, public trust, civic fairness, and constitutional protection suffer.
Why This Should Worry Everyone
When one powerful company skews the field in its favor, it is not just competitors or citizen groups who lose. It is the character of public space, the messages people are allowed to see or hear, and the very legitimacy of local governance.
Residents deserve to have their municipalities regulate billboards for traffic safety, driver distraction, neighborhood aesthetics, and environmental protection. Lamar’s resistance to clearly drawn regulations or its efforts to change laws quietly undermines regulatory power.
Voters deserve accurate, fair access to speech, not exclusion of some views because billboard owners or local authorities bow to ideological pressure.
Communities deserve environmental protection, including trees and buffers that protect health, privacy, and neighborhood quality. Lamar’s tree-poisoning and clearing activities show disregard for those things when they interfere with advertising visibility.
Local political processes deserve transparency and accountability. When billboard firms use settlements, campaign giving, or other influence to push for favorable changes, especially behind the scenes, ordinary citizens lose.
Conclusion
Lamar Advertising stands at the intersection of media, real estate, and regulatory policy. While billboard companies must navigate law and commerce, Lamar’s behavior indicates a persistent bias toward manipulating those carved out laws, bending environmental norms, and favoring its own ideological preferences in speech decisions. The result is not merely business aggressiveness but a corrosion of democratic accountability, environmental stewardship, and public safety.
If local governments, watchdogs, and courts do not more forcefully resist these practices through stronger enforcement, clearer content and permitting rules, greater transparency, and legal accountability, then billboard blight, ideological censorship, and environmental harm will continue under cover of corporate legitimacy.
Source: Lamar Advertising Scandals at a Glance
Tree cutting and poisoning
In Connecticut, courts found Lamar liable for clear-cutting 83 state-owned trees along I-84 in 2008 (Hartford Courant). In Florida, whistleblowers said crews were ordered to poison or chop down trees at night to improve billboard visibility (Business Insider). In Ohio, Lamar paid damages after 34 trees on private land were cut without permission (Corporate Crime Reporter). And in 2021, Providence, Rhode Island forced Lamar to replant 109 trees after subcontractors bulldozed a highway buffer (ecoRI News).
Content controversies
In 2011, a Lamar anti-abortion billboard in Manhattan’s SoHo triggered protests and was quickly removed, with spokesman Hal Kilshaw citing safety concerns (ABC7 NY). Around the same time, in Boise, Lamar rejected atheist billboards reading “Imagine No Religion” (KTVB). More recently, The Satanic Temple sued Lamar after executives dismissed proposed ads as “misleading and offensive” (Family Council court filings).
Political influence
During Los Angeles’s 2015 elections, Lamar donated tens of thousands of dollars in billboard space to city council incumbents while suing the city to overturn digital billboard restrictions (CBS Los Angeles). Watchdogs questioned whether campaign support was tied to Lamar’s push for favorable ordinances.
Court battles
Lamar repeatedly challenged local restrictions on off-site and digital billboards. In 2016, a California appellate court reinstated Los Angeles’s ban, reaffirming the city’s right to limit billboard proliferation (Los Angeles Times). In 2018, Lamar lost another case after rebuilding a storm-damaged sign without a permit, confirming that local zoning rules still apply (California Court of Appeal decision).
