Owners Will Be Billed for City’s Costs : 800 Signs Fall Victim to Anaheim Law

About 800 signs have been pulled from utility poles, street medians and other public sites in Anaheim, the result of a City Council vote last week.

Because the council voted to revise the city’s sign ordinance as an urgency measure, a city crew did not have to wait the normal 30-day period for the law to go into effect.

The next day, city employees hit the streets. Their booty included about 300 political signs along Anaheim’s major avenues and boulevards, John Poole, code enforcement supervisor, said Monday.

The largest number of signs removed, 61, belonged to Larry Bales, who lost his bid in the primary for county recorder. Another 38 belonged to Judge Betty L. Elias of Orange County North Municipal Court, seeking reelection in November. And Orange Mayor James H. Beam, who is running for a county Board of Supervisors seat against Anaheim Mayor Donald R. Roth, lost 18. (None of the signs belonged to Roth, Poole said.)

Bales, Elias and Beam, along with others who had more than a handful of signs illegally posted on places like utility poles, will be billed for the city’s work, but the amount had not been decided by Monday afternoon, Poole said.

The ordinance approved last Tuesday allows the city to remove illegal signs and charge their owners for removing and storing them, sets a $50 fine upon conviction of the violation and a $50 reward for information that results in a conviction.

Poole said the city cannot win a conviction unless a person is actually seen placing the sign in a public right of way, so those who retrieve their signs will be billed for the city’s work but not fined. Currently, the signs--ranging from real estate to garage sale advertisements--are stored in a city warehouse.

An older city ordinance regarding signs did not specifically address political ones or include a procedure to inventory, notify and charge owners. Officials approved the revised ordinance because they said a proliferation of political signs in public rights of way created safety hazards.

City code enforcement officials don’t plan further sweeps but will respond to complaints lodged with their office, Poole said.

Safety Problems Cited

Similar complaints about signs causing safety problems led the county last November to begin tearing down and uprooting signs posted illegally on county rights of way.

That first weekend netted the county 1,125 notices. Since then, there has been “a substantial reduction,” said Dave King, public works operation superintendent with the county’s Environmental Management Agency. Now, King said Monday, jail work-release inmates collect about 400 signs each weekend.

In Orange, city officials earlier this year considered setting fines and charges for seized signs but opted against it because of the paper work involved.

“The City of Anaheim will spend more taxpayers’ dollars setting this bureaucracy up to collect these little fines than collect the fines. If they were in private enterprise, they wouldn’t do that. In Orange, we just take them down,” Beam said.