GUEST WORDS-People in Los Angeles love digital billboards!! We can't get enough of them! Give us more!!! Oh, thank god, the LA City Council is ON IT. Lawsuits have tragically darkened so many of those blinky, flashy ads, but yesterday the City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee voted to bring them back big time.
They want to create about two dozen sign districts spread throughout the city where ad companies could go nuts with the digital billboards, and then also make it possible for digital billboards to go up anywhere in the city through a special permitting process, "giving sign companies more options for placement," as the LA Daily News puts it.
The PLUM Committee also decided to drop a requirement that would force billboard companies to take down static billboards in exchange for putting up new digital billboards, and they voted to pass on a plan that would give amnesty to all the hundreds and hundreds of billboards throughout LA that don't have proper permits. We might not ever have to lose a single precious billboard.
Why is our City Council so eager to allow billboard companies to blight our city with shitty, distracting ads? Well, we all love them, obviously, but also billboards create jobs somehow. "Voting to support digital billboard districts and permitting is voting to support the future of local jobs" in some way, according to someone from the LA County Federation of Labor.
(Adrian Glick Kudler is Senior Editor at the excellent LA Curbed … where this guest perspective originated.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 55
Pub: Jul 7, 2015
