Ordinances

A Colorado ski resort town has abandoned a short-lived attempt to require residents to take steps to protect their homes from wildfire. Town leaders in Breckenridge decided this week to revoke an ordinance ordering homeowners to thin vegetation around their houses -- a mandate that, though common in California, remains unusual in other Western states.

Alarmed at the possibility that its temporary ban on new outdoor advertising could be suspended or struck down in court, the Los Angeles City Council decided Wednesday to seek an emergency ordinance to prevent new digital billboards, supergraphics or certain other outdoor signs from going up. The council unanimously scheduled the vote on the new law for Friday.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Friday for an emergency measure that would prohibit new digital billboards, multistory supergraphics and certain signs that face freeways from being installed throughout the city. The ordinance was unanimously approved by the council out of fears that a federal judge could issue an injunction later this month blocking the city from enforcing an existing temporary ban on outdoor signs. The council has been passing temporary bans to give it time to rewrite its sign laws in a way that can withstand a legal challenge.

Looking to protect more of its urban forest, the Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to draft a law allowing city inspectors to issue a $1,000 fine for anyone who illegally removes a street tree. Under the proposal, citations would be issued to those caught chopping down a tree without city permission in a median strip or on a parkway -- the area between the curb and the sidewalk, said Bill Robertson, general manager of the Bureau of Street Services. The fine also would apply to trees that are on private property but are protected by other city laws, including California bay, Western sycamore and Southern California black walnut trees.

A federal judge refused Monday to halt enforcement of the Los Angeles City Council's newest outdoor advertising law, which bars the installation of new digital billboards and multistory supergraphic signs across the city. In a tentative ruling, U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins said Liberty Media Corp. had failed to show a likelihood that it would prevail with its procedural arguments against the month-old ordinance. Liberty had asked Collins to issue an injunction blocking enforcement of the new law and forcing the city to allow 16 new signs.

Opening a new front in the city's efforts to reduce tagging, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday approved an ordinance requiring that all new homes include a finish that is resistant to spray paint unless the owners promise to remove any graffiti themselves. The measure, which was unanimously approved, extends a provision in the Los Angeles Municipal Code requiring that new commercial buildings and apartments be coated to a height of 9 feet with an impermeable material, such as ceramic tile, baked enamel or a chemical gloss.

With its moratorium on new medical marijuana dispensaries declared unlawful, the Los Angeles City Council is now poised to act quickly on a strict ordinance that it has struggled with fitfully for more than two years. On Tuesday, the city attorney's office delivered a draft that some members want the council to take up within a week. The sudden acceleration stems from a Superior Court ruling Monday that left the city unable to enforce its ban and derailed its four-month-old drive to shut down new dispensaries.

Cheyenne, Wyo., City Councilman Jim Brown, thinking it was time his city joined the national movement to keep drivers from being distracted by their hand-held cellphones, steered an ordinance banning the practice into law last month. Now he's getting an earful from outraged Wyomingites. "We have the right to bear a cellphone," said M. Lee Hasenauer, 49, who collected more than 3,500 signatures for a petition against the ordinance. If the city clerk validates at least 2,800, officials must put the ordinance to a public vote or repeal it. If the effort -- dubbed "Can You Hear Me Now?"

The Los Angeles City Council moved Thursday to consider a controversial medical marijuana ordinance in early November, as a poll released by a national organization that supports marijuana legalization found that more than three-quarters of voters in the county want dispensaries regulated, not prosecuted and closed. The council action comes after a Superior Court judge ruled Monday that the city's moratorium on dispensaries had been illegally extended. With the city unable to enforce it, Councilman Greig Smith decided Thursday not to hold a hearing on the proposed ordinance in the Public Safety Committee, but to send it straight to the council.

Advocates for day laborers and other low-wage workers are pushing for a new city law that would target unscrupulous employers by making wage theft a crime in the city of Los Angeles. They have found an ally in City Councilman Richard Alarcon, who plans to introduce a motion this morning directing the city attorney's office to write an ordinance that would criminalize nonpayment of wages. "People think that just because they pick up somebody on the street or at a day laborer center that they don't have the responsibility to pay them if they don't like the work," Alarcon said.