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Parks, Billboards & LA’s Self-defeating Ways |
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The City
By Dennis Hathaway
Question: What do billboards along a downtown freeway and a park project in south-central L.A. have to do with each other? And more importantly, what do these things have to tell us about the non-transparent, sometimes divisive and often self-defeating way the city goes about conducting the public’s business?
 But first a little history. Six years ago, the city embarked upon the Santa Monica Blvd improvement project, which included removing the old railroad right-of-way that ran down the middle of that street. This right-of-way was actually owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and there were 14 billboards on it, but the MTA terminated the billboard company leases, the billboards were removed and the project got underway.
However, the billboard company, Clear Channel, asked the MTA for monetary compensation, and when the MTA refused on the grounds that it had a right to terminate the month-to-month leases, the company sued, seeking $15 million in damages.
In the meantime, the city had been sued by Santa Monica Baykeepers over its discharge of polluted storm water runoff in the ocean. To settle this lawsuit, the city was proposing a “wetlands” park in south-central L.A. that would not only act to naturally treat storm water runoff but provide badly needed park and recreation facilities for that part of the city. The site picked out for this park was a rundown MTA maintenance facility on South Avalon Blvd.
Somewhere in the negotiations between the city and the MTA for purchase of this land, the MTA said it would sell the Avalon Blvd facility on the condition that the city allow Clear Channel to put up four billboards on an MTA bus yard abutting the 10 freeway just south of downtown. In return, Clear Channel would drop its lawsuit against the MTA over the removal of the billboards on Santa Monica Blvd.
Did anyone in the boardrooms of the MTA and the corridors of city hall stop and say, maybe this isn’t such a brilliant idea? Did anyone mention that there might be public opposition to allowing four 76 ft. high billboards within 100 feet of the freeway, two with digital faces broadcasting brightly-lit, rapidly-changing messages 24 hours a day? We’ll never know, of course, because everything was worked out behind closed doors, protected by the exemption of such matters as litigation and property negotiations from the open meetings requirements of the Brown Act.
The concoction managed to slip along under the radar until it reached the city council late last year in the form of an environmental impact report (EIR) for the wetlands park project. There, a member of the public actually took the time to read the thing and found buried deep within its 150 pages the freeway billboards provision. Word got out to people who have been fighting for years to protect city freeways from becoming corridors of advertising, people started firing off e-mails to council members’ offices, and councilwoman Jan Perry, the sponsor of the park project in her district, yanked the EIR from the agenda.
A public airing finally came earlier this month, when the city planning commission considered the supplemental use district that would be necessary to allow the billboards on the MTA property. Although Perry appeared and made an impassioned appeal for the park project, the commission unanimously rejected the supplemental use district, which in commission president Jane Usher’s words would open a door to freeway billboards that could never be closed again. Now it’s up to the city council to decide whether it wants to overrule the commission and allow the park and billboards proposal to move forward, or to send a message to the MTA to find some other way to settle the Clear Channel lawsuit.
Could all of this have been avoided if public officials had tried to assess public opinion before committing millions of dollars and an untold amount of time to a project with major implications to everyone in the city? Jan Perry has alluded to affluent westsiders who care more about billboards than about children and others in her district who desperately need more recreational facilities, and it’s not hard to believe that this kind of divisiveness could be avoided if officials would give up their old habits of doing business behind closed doors and dropping elaborate proposals in the public’s lap as if they should be fait accomplis. (Dennis Hathaway is a community activist and a political observer. Hathaway at one time served on the Venice Neighborhood Council.) _
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