Activists Fighting Weekend Clutter : Installer Fined in Illegal Signs Case

A Canoga Park sign installer who was arrested on a complaint by anti-sign vigilantes pleaded guilty Tuesday to one misdemeanor count and was fined $171 in Van Nuys Municipal Court.

David P. Laubacher, 30, also was placed on one year’s probation by Judge Michael B. Harwin for violating a Los Angeles city ordinance that prohibits posting of any signs on public property.

Laubacher could have been fined $1,000 and jailed for six months.

Despite Laubacher’s conviction, two leaders of the anti-sign movement said Tuesday that their efforts have reduced--but not eliminated--the forest of developers’ placards erected each Friday night to promote new housing tracts, and removed on Sunday night.

The complaint against Laubacher was filed in April by Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, one of several groups along Ventura Boulevard in the forefront of the anti-sign effort.

Martin Vranicar Jr., supervising deputy city attorney in the Van Nuys office, said it was “unusual and maybe unprecedented” for a private individual to file such a complaint.

Silver said he shadowed Laubacher for two weekends. He said the installer posted signs on utility poles or drove sign-bearing wooden stakes into the ground along Ventura Boulevard. Silver, who wrote down Laubacher’s license plate number and then asked police to arrest him, said that he hopes “this will be the first of many arrests, now that there has been a successful prosecution.”

Fewer Signs Seen

He said that in recent months, there has been “somewhat of a decline in the number of signs, at least in Encino.”

Gordon Murley, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowner Assn., said that he and members of his group have stopped five sign installers in recent months and warned them not to post placards in their community.

“But they just change the time they come around,” he said, “so there has only been a slight decrease in signs. And the decline might just be seasonal.”

Murley said his group continues to tear down up to 100 such signs each month.

Vranicar said he had hoped that the Laubacher case would shed light on firms involved in posting the signs, but that the guilty plea and the demise several months ago of Directional Design, the Calabasas firm that employed Laubacher, “effectively rules that out.”

Directional Design’s telephone was no longer in service, and Vranicar said investigators had learned the firm was out of business.

Laubacher, a computer consultant, acknowledged in an interview in June that he worked for Directional Design and that he was responsible for many of the placards installed on power poles or on wooden stakes on the Valley’s major streets.

He also said he saw “nothing morally wrong with putting up the signs” since he faithfully removed them each Sunday.

Laubacher did not return a reporter’s calls Tuesday.

Homeowners said the cardboard signs give their streets a cluttered and trashy appearance every weekend.