Jeanne Weigum is no fan of billboards, oversized banners or flashing outdoor ads. As a founding member of Scenic St. Paul, she’s accustomed to taking her aesthetic concerns to City Hall and squaring off against corporate marketers in the name of blight-busting.

Her latest fight, however, may be her toughest challenge yet.

The Minnesota Wild, the operators of St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center, plan to install a 2,900-square-foot banner on the Kellogg Boulevard face of the downtown hockey arena — a giant Apple ad 58 feet high and 50 feet wide.

“It would be pictures of Wild players, NHL players. On the bottom it would say ‘Shot on an iPhone,’ ” said Bill Huepenbecker, senior director of planning and public affairs at the St. Paul Arena Co. The Arena Co. is the building management division of the Minnesota Wild.

Under the city’s zoning code, a temporary banner would ordinarily be no more than 6 feet tall.

“It’s similar in size to banners that we’ve had on that wall before, in 2011 and 2016,” said Huepenbecker, noting he had received only supportive comments from downtown business and neighborhood organizations. The previous ads, which decorated the Xcel Center for several months apiece, advertised national gymnastics and figure skating competitions.

The variance request recently received the approval of the St. Paul Board of Zoning Appeals, which is allowing the temporary banner for the next three years, among other departures from zoning regulations.

RESIDENT STATING HER CASE

Weigum, however, has filed a seven-page appeal urging the board to reconsider its decision. She plans to state her case at a public hearing on Jan. 27, though she expects the issue may further escalate to the city council for a final determination.

Weigum pointed out that the applicant — officially listed as Huepenbecker — was granted two variances related to the ad’s size and duration. Under the city’s zoning code, the temporary ad would ordinarily be allowed to measure no more than 120 square feet for a total of 90 days.

“1,095 days is an obscene exaggeration,” wrote Weigum, in her Dec. 24 appeal, “and under no common use of the language could three years be considered ‘temporary’ nor in harmony with the intent of the zoning code.”

Weigum noted a series of additional restrictions that the application should have triggered. The city’s zoning code allows a maximum of two advertising signs at a professional sports facility, and two signs already exist. (The code otherwise bans large private ads on public property).

Temporary banners are not supposed to be more than 6 feet tall under the code. And they cannot project higher than 37 1/2 feet above grade. The highest point of the proposed sign is 96 feet, for a variance of 58 1/2 feet.

“There is no basis for determining that a sign 25 times normal is in character with the surrounding area,” she wrote.

AD ON I-94 ALSO AT ISSUE

The Xcel Center ad isn’t the only billboard fight simmering at City Hall. Another appeal likely to come before the city council by early February centers on a proposed digital billboard on Interstate 94 near Minnesota 280.

In exchange for the right to replace an existing illuminated billboard with the digital one, New York-based OutFront Media has promised to remove roughly 5,000 square feet of standard billboards from elsewhere throughout the city, totaling up to 30 billboards.

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Critics, including Weigum and fellow Scenic St. Paul chair John Mannillo, have raised safety concerns and pointed out that the 30 billboard locations are dilapidated or underused sites that weren’t making the company money or had already been taken down, such as the relatively small-to-midsized “junior” boards on the sides of buildings.

They’ve also noted that if future road construction along I-94 interferes with the digital billboard, taxpayers could be left on the hook.

After the Minnesota Department of Transportation removed five billboards from the route of the U.S. 52-Lafayette Bridge replacement project in 2010-2011, MnDOT paid Clear Channel Communications $7.3 million in compensation for lost future revenue, including $4.3 million for the digital display alone.