PIERRE, S.D. — South Dakota residents fighting to protect an unobstructed view of their Western Black Hills expressed worry Wednesday that towering electronic billboards considered crucial by local business will scar the landscape along a picturesque portion of Interstate 90.

Senate lawmakers are now mired in a battle between the bulk of Rapid City’s nearly 68,000 residents who want their area free of signs and mom and pop shops that use them to promote services and create revenue from sales taxes.

During a Senate Transportation hearing, senators sided with the local stores and restaurants, voting 6-1 in support of a bill that regulates sizes, lights and measurements of electronic signs, but doesn’t allow local governments to ban them. They can, however, monitor the brightness of the lights.

“This silences the vote of my constituents,” said Rapid City Mayor Sam Kooiker after the vote, referring to the fact that if the Senate bill becomes law, it would override an ordinance that went into effect in June 2011 stopping new digital signs from going up in Rapid City, close to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands National Park. “It’s an issue of public safety and aesthetics; it’s an issue with flashing, scrolling signs,” Kooiker said. “This is an attempt to regulate that and provide a measure of balance.”

But emerging businesses say they need those signs to deal with drivers who no longer listen to ads on local radio stations.

When people travel, they listen to their own music or to satellite radio, so “local businesses have lost that avenue to bring their products or services to the attention of users,” said Aelred Kurtenbach, co-founder of Daktronics, a Brookings, S.D.-based electronic signs maker. “It’s expensive to get your message on a standard billboard. With a digital billboard ... you can just buy the space for maybe every ten seconds out of a minute.”

Longtime Rapid City resident Cathie Calhoon disagreed. She said citizens should be able to say “enough is enough.”

“If you’ve traveled through (Rapid City and the Black Hills), you’ve seen the blight that we are fighting,” she said, holding photographs of the billboards along the highway traveling from Box Elder to Rapid City. Calhoon said already the digital signs are “bombarding” passers-by each minute.

The bill goes next to the full Senate for a vote