Bossier City, LA Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

Section 9.10 of the Unified Development Code creates a distinct category for digital signage it calls an Electronic Message Center, defined broadly enough to cover any sign face changed by computer-generated messages or similar electronic means. The city restricts where these can go: an EMC is allowed only in nonresidential zoning districts as a matter of right, and it can appear in a residential district only through the separate Residential Electronic Message Center approval under Section 9.12. Section 9.10.1 caps an EMC's size at whatever the sign it replaces or the district otherwise permits under Section 9.7.1, so going digital does not itself unlock a larger sign face.

The display rules in Section 9.10.2 are specific: the copy cannot be animated, blinking, chasing, flashing, or otherwise moving, though the code is careful to say that changing from one static message to the next is not itself a prohibited moving effect. Each message has to stay on screen for a minimum of 8 seconds, and the changeover to the next message has to happen within two seconds and simultaneously across the entire face, not scroll or wipe across it. If the sign malfunctions and starts producing motion, flashing, or similar effects outside those rules, it has to be shut off.

The steepest requirement sits in Section 9.10.3: the Metropolitan Planning Commission will approve a new EMC, or an upgrade of an existing sign to EMC technology, only if the applicant agrees in writing to remove one or more existing off-premise signs, poles included, whose combined area equals at least twice the square footage of the new digital face, a trade-off built to shrink the overall number and area of billboards along Bossier City's interstate corridors even as digital technology replaces static ones.