Illegal Billboards

Take a good, long look at the spectacular vistas that ring Los Angeles, hills and snow-capped mountains, views for the most part still unobscured from our freeways. A City Council committee may take action today that could all but obliterate these L.A. postcards, putting them behind a forest of huge double-sided billboards. What began late last year as a welcome effort to thin out the city's ugly thicket of more than 7,000 billboards may be veering off course.

To have heard Hal Bernson last winter was to believe that the city councilman and chair of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee was, like most local residents, fed up to here with humongous billboards sprouting up across the city. Bernson thundered and railed at the billboard executives present at a series of committee hearings. There would be a moratorium on new signs, he insisted. The city was going to crack down on the many unpermitted and abandoned billboards.

I wavered over my newspaper for a long time the other morning, trying to figure out which tale jerked my chain harder: My colleague Ann O'Neill's story about the billionaire's ex-wife wanting $320,000 a month in child support for one child. Or my colleague Tina Daunt's story about a billionaire industry spreading millions in free political ads and campaign bucks around town in hopes of getting a civic blessing on its signs, which a fellow in Louisiana has called "litter on sticks."

Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson called Friday for the demolition of an illegal billboard in his district and the prosecution of its owner. Bernson, unhappy with delays in city enforcement of billboard ordinances, said his own survey of 5% of the signs in his northwest San Fernando Valley district turned up at least three unlicensed billboards. Tearing down one of them would provide the grounds to challenge a state law that makes illegal signs legal after five years.

The City Council approved an ordinance Friday that will allow the city to inspect and inventory the thousands of billboards in Los Angeles, which officials said will pinpoint illegal signs and be the first step in curtailing their proliferation. The council in 2002 approved a similar inspection program that two of the largest billboard companies in the city, Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor, challenged in court in part as an infringement on their 1st Amendment rights. In 2006, they reached a settlement with the city that allowed 840 of their billboards to be upgraded to digital displays.

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich's campaign against towering supergraphics has yielded several victories in sign-saturated Hollywood, with eight of the oversize images coming down in three weeks -- a major break from the stalemate of previous years. Prosecutors announced Friday that two of Hollywood's tallest and most controversial images, standing at an estimated 11 stories near Highland Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard, were being removed after the billboard company received a cease-and-desist letter.

All he asks, Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich frequently says, is that voters judge him on his record. As he wages an uphill battle to hang onto to his job in the May 21 election, Trutanich rattles off a list of reasons he should be "rehired" to head one of the nation's largest municipal law firms. He cites a substantially reduced reliance on costly outside attorneys, favorable outcomes in lawsuits that he says have saved taxpayers more than $300 million and a crackdown on illegal billboards that activists called scourges on their neighborhoods.

City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo is facing opposition from Los Angeles beautification advocates for having pushed a lawsuit settlement that could allow hundreds of new and existing illegal billboards to get permits. Critics question Delgadillo's impartiality in negotiating the deal because sign companies donated $424,000 worth of billboard space to support his first election in 2001.

It was a good week for the billboard industry in California: Proposals aimed at weeding out thousands of illegal billboards in Los Angeles and preventing new electronic signs along state freeways were blocked in the Legislature. However, a measure that would have allowed a billboard promoting beer to remain outside the Honda Center in Anaheim was shelved, at least temporarily. Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo sponsored legislation by Sen.

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday agreed to establish an annual billboard fee to pay for the inventory and inspection of signs in the city. The fee--set at $477 per sign--will cover the costs of creating a citywide list of billboards in an effort to identify illegal signs. Under the plan approved by the council, sign owners will be required to affix a certificate to each billboard.