Billboards gone wild
Los Angeles is losing the war on billboards.
Despite a six-year-old ban on new billboards, activists say Los Angeles' streets, sidewalks and buildings have more advertising than ever. Kerry Cavanaugh in the Daily News.
Court rulings, legal settlements, rampant disregard for the restrictions and weak enforcement have crippled L.A.'s attempts to limit signs and prohibit illegal signs.
There are at least 10,000 billboards in L.A., and as many as one-third of them are illegal. Plus, there are increasing numbers of supergraphic ads that swathe the sides of buildings and minibillboard advertisements line sidewallks.
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About The
Sausage Factory
The Los Angeles Daily News' City Hall reporters Rick Orlov and Kerry Cavanaugh write about politics on the local, state and national stage.
This is an outrage, especially for those areas of the city that have fought gigantic, ugly, sometimes offensive and often illegal billboards for years.
If some areas want them, notably Jan Perry/Ed Reyes/Wesson, they should respect still respect the battles others have fought to hold these companies accountable -- to pay for the billboards they put up and abide by restrictions in the communities where they don't belong. Instead, the former two have derided anti-billboard activists as "elitists," uncaring and more, because ClearChannel/CBS Outdoors used fancy footwork to convince them that they were the "good guys," kicking a few bucks toward a park in Perry's area in exchange for the city turning a blind eye to their refusing to honor the City's Billboard Ordinance and, in fact suing the city.
This all gets so tangled it's hard to explain, but Christine Pelicek in the L A Weekly and Jill Stewart, wrote a couple of good articles on this. Rocky Delgadillo's office's mishandling of the settlements apparently plays a key role, and he just happened to get $500K from these companies in free ads for his City Attorney race against billboard activist Feuer. Wesson apparently just wants the revenue in his Koreatown district, but adjacent residential areas want to keep them at bay.
A recent court ruling made the argument these billboard proponents put forth -- that their communities can welcome billboards from companies that are violating the City's ordinance, without requiring others to -- clearly wrong. The ruling stated that since "the city" as a collective entity allows the rules to be broken by even one company in certain Billboard Districts, the city can't restrict other companies from equal rights (to break the law).
Just shows what happens when the City Council, like the city, is divided between first and third world perspectives and priorities, and between commercial and residential, often just a couple of blocks apart. They really need to sit down and respect each other's areas, not play class warfare politics against those trying to come up with a coherent law for the whole city.