gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- Opponents and proponents of a Georgia company's push to legalize digital billboards in Durham both claim polling data is on their side, but the two existing surveys each have flaws.
A Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau survey from last year found that 72 percent of residents surveyed wanted to retain existing rules that make it impossible for companies like Fairway Outdoor Advertising to add billboards or upgrade to digital displays.
Fairway, meanwhile, has circulated its own polling from the summer of 2007 that showed majorities in favor of billboard relocations and digital models.
The differences have Visitors Bureau and Fairway representatives quarreling about whose survey methods were better, with the arguing focusing mostly on the wording of the questions.
Fairway's poll, however, offered a significant clue about why the company opted to start pushing for an ordinance change in a big way two years ago.
In asking people to say whether they found billboards good for business or unattractive, the company and its North Carolina-based pollster found a pronounced racial split in the answers.
Of the whites in the 500-person survey group, 58 percent said they found billboards unattractive, and 34 percent thought them good for business.
Those numbers flipped amongst blacks, with 65 percent holding to the pro-business view of billboards and just 25 percent objecting to their appearance.
The Visitors Bureau survey found no real racial split, with blacks and whites who answered its poll being about equally likely to favor the current ordinance.
Fairway representatives contend the bureau primed its respondents to support the ordinance by telling them the existing law prohibits additional billboards in Durham.
That was a foul, they said, because the company isn't asking to increase the number of billboards that are here.
They also argue that the bureau should have asked other questions to probe feeling on the issue, instead of asking just one about support for the existing ordinance.
But Fairway's poll was itself vulnerable to the charge it tried to prime respondents to answer in a certain way.
Its major query about digital billboards was attached to the idea that companies might donate ad space for among other things the politically popular Amber Alert anti-kidnapping program. That drew a 57 percent favorable response.
The company's poll also didn't give respondents any detail about Durham's existing rules, or ask participants if they would favor retaining them.
