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New Ordinance Coming—Forgive the Skepticism |
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Billboard Blight
By Dennis Hathaway
Anyone with an interest in local affairs knows by now that the city’s six-year old ban on new billboards and its attempt to get thousands of illegal billboards removed have been abject failures.
 The visual landscape of the city is being treated more and more as a
canvas to be filled with advertising, and billboards and other forms of
signs put up without any permits or compliance with regulations
continue to generate big profits for the outdoor advertising companies.
The most obvious place to lay blame for this situation is at the door of those deep-pocketed companies, which have repeatedly sued the city to block enforcement of the ban and other sign regulations. But one could argue that the real culprit in this mess is the city council itself, which has repeatedly taken actions that undermine enforcement efforts and give the billboard companies ammunition for their claims that their constitutional rights are being abused. As the cartoon character Pogo famously said, “We have the met the enemy and he is us.”
Now, on the heels of adverse court rulings and news media exposure of the sorry state of billboard regulation, six city council members are proposing to rewrite the city’s sign ordinances. The intent, according to their motion, will be to “to ensure consistency with constitutional law and other applicable laws” and to “toughen and create easily enforceable time/place/manner restrictions citywide to protect neighborhoods.”
If the full city council adopts the motion, the task of translating these generalities into the details of ordinances with actual teeth will fall to the city planning department, with “consultation” provided by the department of building and safety and the city attorney’s office. Which raises immediate questions: Hasn’t the city attorney arguably been part of the problem here, by negotiating lawsuit settlements outrageously generous to billboard companies? Hasn’t the building department issued permits for billboards in direct violation of ordinances? Haven’t some planners and zoning administrators made specious findings in billboard-related cases?
The names of the city council members sponsoring the motion to rewrite the ordinances—Jack Weiss, Wendy Gruel, Eric Garcetti, Bill Rosendahl, Herb Wesson, and Ed Reyes—should also raise a few eyebrows.
Last year, Wesson pushed for approval of a giant video billboard on the Korean Consulate building in his district, and now wants the city to designate an eighteen-block square area of Koreatown as a special sign district that could allow video, digital, and supergraphic advertising signs not currently permitted.
Five of the six council members—Weiss being the exception—voted earlier this year to allow Clear Channel to put up 76 ft. high digital billboards alongside the I-10 freeway downtown, and Reyes has proposed a special sign district of his own, adjacent to the 110 freeway north of downtown, which if approved will most certainly result in digital advertisements glaring in the faces of the hundreds of thousands of motorists who pass by every day.
The council has also approved other sign districts and individual exceptions to ordinances and zoning regulations, to allow giant “supergraphic” signs that wrap the entire sides of buildings, as well as signs that do not comply with regulations regarding height, area, and placement. Companies suing the city have cited these exceptions as violating their own rights to put up signs where they please, and have gotten injunctions against enforcement as a result.
Even more importantly, these actions of the city council have betrayed the public trust and the enthusiasm mobilized by the 2002 billboard ban and the commitment to find and get rid of illegal signs. And the public ought to be excused for feeling more than a little skeptical about how much difference rewriting the sign ordinances will make in the fight against the infestation of our visual spaces with advertising.
In any case, those who feel strongly about this issue should not sit back and wait for the council to rubber stamp something concocted by the very city departments that have come up with sweetheart lawsuit settlements and otherwise acted in ways beneficial, not to the public, but to companies they are sworn to regulate. Those with a stake in this issue—anti-blight activists, architects, neighborhood councils, anyone who feels they should have a voice in what goes on in their community—should be at the table to weigh in on details of these new ordinances.
In fact, the neighborhood councils could play a leading role here, and gain both credibility and some clout at city hall in the bargain. For example, representatives could be appointed from each council to form a group that would actually consult with the planning department in the process of rewriting the ordinances.
There may be other viable ideas, but the point is that the public must be part of the process, because everyone knows that lobbyists prowling the corridors of city hall will be making sure that the advertising industry interests are well represented. (Dennis Hathaway is a community activist and a political observer. Hathaway is a member of the Venice Neighborhood Council Land Use and Planning Committee and a contributor to CityWatch.) ◘
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