Council Members Suggest Ban on Ad Flyers Left on Windshields

To Los Angeles City Council members Hal Bernson and Joan Milke Flores, they come on like a street hustler saying, “Psst . . . Yeah, you. Lookin’ for a good time?”

They are advertising flyers, often as small as business cards, touting “phone sex” on the 976 toll lines and X-rated videos, and are usually placed on the windshields of parked cars. In auto-oriented Los Angeles, Flores and Bernson say, the cards have become an increasingly common advertising medium--and one that is “getting out of hand.”

Bernson and Flores introduced a motion Tuesday asking the city attorney’s office to study possible ordinances to restrict such advertising--regardless of the product. Whether the flyers cause moral decay is debatable, they say, but the nuisance and litter they cause is not. The motion was referred to the council’s Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee.

Before the proliferation of phone-sex flyers, “people were annoyed. Now they’re getting angry,” Flores said. “We ought to be able to have some control over this.”

The number of complaints has taken a sharp upswing since the advent of the 976 toll lines, they said. “You know, the ones that say ‘I’m Candy. Call me,’ ” Bernson said. People who call such numbers typically pay a toll starting at $2 and hear a brief, sexually explicit message.

Bernson and Flores anticipate an ordinance that would restrict businesses from placing ads on cars outright, or would call for car owners to warn advertisers away by placing “no solicitations” stickers on their vehicles.

In their motion, the council members stress that all “legitimately operated businesses have a right to advertise their goods and services.” The windshield flyer phenomenon appears to “be a recent and expedient alternative to the age-old practice of standing on the street and handing flyers to passers-by,” Flores said. “It is expedient because the automobile cannot refuse to accept the flyer.”

Such advertising is common whether cars are parked on public or private property. Flores said she does not believe such advertising is covered under First Amendment protections of freedom of speech because the cars themselves are typically private property.

“The practice of using automobiles as billboards of opportunity,” the council members said in their motion, “creates more ills to society in the form of litter, inconveniences and sometimes even an invasion of privacy than the protection of the practice warrants.”

Advertisers, they noted, could simply go back to street corners and hand the flyers out.