Big bright blight

The cityscape of Los Angeles is under assault by a wave of electronic billboards. They loom, glowing, over the busiest intersections on the Westside. They beam their rotation of images into bedroom windows in Silver Lake. They rise above the downtown freeways, demanding attention from drivers.

In December, the Los Angeles City Council called for a cease-fire in the form of a moratorium on new billboards for three months. And now vital backup has arrived: a ruling from the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding the city’s earlier attempt to regulate billboards.

City Hall needs to build on that momentum and adopt a drastic battle plan to keep our neighborhoods from being overrun by technologies that didn’t exist when the court case began.

Los Angeles was caught flat-footed once before. The gasoline price spikes of the 1970s drove many independent filling stations out of business, which led to a glut of available land on prime corner locations. Before local governments figured out the effect of this economic shift, street corners all over the city had been overtaken by mini-malls.

As with the transition from corner filling stations to strips of convenience stores, the proliferation of electronic billboards is the result of a combination of factors. Advertisers are looking for new ways to penetrate the consciousness of consumers (especially captive audiences in cars and on buses). Developers and property owners claim they need the billboard revenue and now frequently direct their architects to incorporate billboards into building designs. New technology makes it possible for signs to be brighter and to change images every five to 10 seconds. A new type of LED-embedded glass will make it possible for the whole side of a high-rise building to throb with electronic images.

But the digital advertising trend is just the latest chapter in the city’s long, troubled history with billboards. As major financial donors to local political campaigns, the billboard companies can get City Hall’s attention. They generally have succeeded in watering down government regulation, making Los Angeles the nation’s worst big-city example of billboard blight.

When the City Council tried to regulate billboards in 2002, the outdoor advertising companies sued. That led to a 2006 settlement negotiated by the city attorney’s office and approved by the council that gave the industry carte blanche to convert 840 existing billboards into electronic displays.

In the interim, cash-strapped city officials have been tempted by the money that could be generated by making a deal for a share of billboard revenues. They’ve started entertaining offers from billboard companies to provide subsidies for city parks and other popular services and amenities -- in return for approval of new billboards.

But no amount of siphoned-off billboard revenues is worth sacrificing public safety. California has passed state laws regulating cellphone use and text-messaging while driving because we know that such distractions cause car accidents. And yet a digital billboard, like the one recently installed in my neighborhood at Silver Lake Boulevard and Effie Street, is undeniably meant to draw a driver’s eyes off the road. It could easily distract a driver at night from noticing pedestrians in a crosswalk, bicycles or turning cars.

As a first step in reclaiming our visual landscape, the city should establish a procedure for checking the safety of all new electronic billboards. In the meantime, it should shut down the nighttime illumination of any billboard that might endanger pedestrians, cyclists or drivers.

Then the city needs to get its own house in order. There is no official inventory of billboards, no record of which ones are legal or put up without permits. Without this inventory, the city can’t crack down on violations. And we need tougher penalties for scofflaw property owners who put up billboards without permits or in violation of the moratorium.

But even before an inventory is complete, the city could make it harder to put up new billboards. The current fee is ridiculously low -- a one-time charge as low as $200. Billboards generate many thousands of dollars each month, and it’s reasonable to consider whether the city is entitled to a bigger, ongoing share of the windfall going to property owners and billboard companies. The other side of this argument, however, is that substantial fees might encourage cash-strapped cities to approve even more billboards.

The 9th Circuit ruling and the billboard moratorium provide an opportunity to have a public discussion about the kind of urban environment we want and how to achieve it. They raise a broader question, not aired often enough in this city, about how to protect the public interest from private interests maximizing their economic gain.

The cityscape is public property -- just like access to a street, or a building such as City Hall, or the airwaves. It’s time for Los Angeles to ask: Just because there is a willing seller and a willing buyer, is the sale itself good for the public interest?