State crews will pull and toss leftover campaign signs along Fairbanks-area highways

State highway crews in the Fairbanks area will start pulling leftover campaign signs from highway rights-of-way this week, and they'll throw them away, the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities said Thursday.

The election was Nov. 3. The next day, the department asked campaigns and volunteers to pull their own signs, stakes included, saying it "would rather have crews plowing snow this winter than pulling stakes out of ditches."

Crews in the department's Fairbanks District will fit the work around winter maintenance, and most signs should be gone before Thanksgiving. Clearing them cuts down on debris that can get buried or damaged during snow removal, the department said.

The signs crews take down "will not be stored for retrieval," the department said, and owners can be charged at least $50 a sign for the removal under state rules. The department is urging owners to pull any that remain "as soon as possible."

Campaign signs aren't allowed at any time, whatever they say, in a state highway's right-of-way, the strip of land along the road that's set aside for the highway. Crews can remove them without notice and give priority to signs near intersections, driveways, sidewalks and pathways, where they can block visibility or access, according to the department's June letter to candidates.

Alaska bans billboards, but a 2018 court judgment in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Alaska and others lets small, temporary campaign signs stay up on private land outside the right-of-way. They can be up to 32 square feet, about 4 by 8 feet, and must be displayed by the property's owners or residents without pay. The Fairbanks cleanup doesn't touch those.