An advertisement for fighting L.A.'s excess of billboards
"I got a call this morning from one of my spies," Dennis Hathaway was telling me Monday at his dining room table in Venice. "Looks like there's a digital conversion up near the airport."
Hathaway has eyeballs all over Los Angeles, an army of ticked off citizens doing a job city officials have failed to do. When members of his volunteer crew spot standard billboards going digital, or signs that look out of compliance with city code, they call Hathaway to report them.
A volunteer muckraker himself, Hathaway plows through haphazard, ill-kept records at City Hall, studies the vast library of advertising industry lawsuits in Los Angeles and reports his findings at www.banbillboardblight.org.
His wife, artist and housing activist Laura Silagi, came into the kitchen, and I asked how much time Hathaway -- a retired construction manager -- spends on his obsession.
"Twelve hours a day," she said without hesitation.
It began a few years ago, said Hathaway, 65. His wife took their 4-year-old grandson for a walk, and at the corner of Palms and Lincoln boulevards, she noticed three mini billboards on the side of a fabric store, advertising movies.
She told Hathaway, who was under the impression that the city had banned off-site advertising, meaning that only a sign for the fabric store itself would have been legal there. Hathaway, who was active in the Venice Neighborhood Council, consulted a planner who told him the signs were no doubt illegal.
Just like that, a fire was lit.
Hathaway, who had been an Iowa newspaper reporter in his 20s, was an old hand at digging for information. A fiction writer in his free time and winner of the 1992 Flannery O'Connor Award for short stories, he switched from writing to research. That led him to the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight, a nonprofit band of fed-up Angelenos, and he now heads the group and runs the website.
It didn't take long for him to understand that L.A.'s meager efforts to control billboard proliferation had been comically inept, with the outdoor advertising industry using muscle, campaign donations and lawsuits to run circles around hapless city officials.
The more he learned about out-of-compliance billboards -- including many erected without permits at all -- the more he took notice of visual blight in Los Angeles, including the super-graphics draped around buildings. He counted 84 billboards on Lincoln Boulevard alone between the airport and the city's border with Santa Monica, which bans billboards.
