3 Years of Talks End : Sign of Change in City: 18 Billboards Cut Down

A billboard proclaiming Pittsburgh as “Most Livable City in the U.S.” fell Friday to the accompaniment of cheers from San Diego city officials. It was the first of 18 billboards that the Santa Fe Realty Corp. has ordered removed from its property. And it was another chapter in the 13-year-old billboard saga of San Diego.

As the palm trees, beaches and blue water of Mission Bay Park appeared behind the fallen sign, Jim O’Gara of Santa Fe Realty said, “Look at that park. It’s a magnificent thing. You can’t appreciate it if you’re looking through Pittsburgh.”

Eighteen billboards between Sea World Drive and Balboa Avenue are scheduled to come down in the next month. They are owned by the Gannett Outdoor and Foster and Kleiser billboard companies and, according to O’Gara, the companies have agreed to remove them. He said Santa Fe will lose $10,000 a year in advertising revenue.

The project is the result of three years of negotiation by City Councilman Mike Gotch and Mayor Roger Hedgecock with Santa Fe officials. Gotch said he has been talking with Santa Fe officials about removing the billboards for “half my six years in office.”

Gotch praised Santa Fe, saying, “Never before has a property owner said, ‘I’m willing to give up revenues to get rid of a billboard.’ Billboards are an anachronism--they no longer belong in a city of the ‘80s.”

Hedgecock, who called billboards a “form of visual blight,” said the stretch along the Santa Fe railroad tracks near Interstate 5 is the highest concentration of billboards in the city other than on El Cajon Boulevard. “I think billboards ought to be eliminated eventually,” he said.

But Mark Riley, San Diego area manager for Foster and Kleiser, said he does not see billboards as a blight or a thing of the past. “Neither do the people who advertise on them,” he said.

In the long battle between the San Diego City Council and the billboard companies, there have been wins and losses. A 1981 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (Metromedia vs. San Diego) upheld the billboard companies’ First Amendment rights to free speech, striking down San Diego’s 1972 ban on billboards. The court decided that the city ordinance went too far by banning billboards with political messages as well as those with exclusively commercial content.

A new ordinance passed by the council in 1984 allows companies with free-standing billboards to keep their signs and even move them to a new site if that site is in an approved business zone within five miles of the original location. It also loosened previous restrictions on the kind of messages businessmen are allowed to put on signs built near or attached to their buildings. The previous ordinance said such “on-premise” signs could only advertise what the businessmen had to sell.

Because of the Supreme Court ruling, the city could no longer order billboard companies to tear down the structures as they did after the 1972 ordinance. Billboards can be removed only at the discretion of landowners like Santa Fe. Gotch said, “I hope small property owners all across the city will follow the lead of Santa Fe. It can only happen if they volunteer.”

Joe Flynn, sign code administrator for the city, said what Santa Fe is doing is “really what the city was trying to do in 1972.” He added, “These things take time. You have a company that’s willing to do it in the scenic interest of San Diego. I think it’s fantastic.”