‘Billboard Alley’ Blues : Agoura Hills’ Effort to Get Rid of 25 Signs Bogs Down in Face of Formidable Resistance

Shortly after Agoura Hills became a city in 1982, residents were asked what the city’s priorities should be.

The No. 1 response to the survey was overwhelming: Get rid of “billboard alley.”

So Agoura Hills set about to purge itself of the collection of 31 billboards that hugged a 3 1/2-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway.

The city lobbied the state Legislature for stricter billboard laws. It tangled with an unhappy sign company in Superior Court over whether a sign could be removed. It entertained the possibility of buying the billboards so they could be destroyed.

But, so far, nothing has worked.

Today, 25 billboards still stand along the freeway and some of those signs have leases stretching into the 21st Century. The six signs that vanished were removed only because property owners decided to develop their land.

“The whole thing is a royal mess,” said Agoura Hills Mayor Jack Koenig. “It’s frustrating.”

Laws Stymie Efforts

The city’s experience, however, is no different from Los Angeles County’s or that of other local jurisdictions in California. Federal and state laws, which protect the powerful billboard industry, have stymied efforts by cities and counties to banish the highway signs.

Essentially, the laws require local governments to compensate a company if they want a billboard removed. A city or county must reimburse the owner not only for the value of the sign itself, but for the revenue that would be lost in by dismantling it. Generally, the billboard companies name their own price.

Because of that, Agoura Hills officials say they could no more afford to buy 25 billboards than they could afford to retire the national debt. In fact, the cost of buying the billboards would probably exceed the city’s entire annual budget of $10.5 million.

City officials received the bad news in 1985 when they explored the possibility of creating a citywide assessment district to finance a buyout of the signs. Ray Paschke, a spokesman for National Advertising Co., estimated that the city would have needed $5 million just to purchase his company’s inventory of billboards three years ago. The company owns most of the billboards in the city.

Today, the price would range anywhere from $5 million to $10 million, Paschke estimated. The signs have grown in value as the number of areas where they are welcomed have decreased, he said. Laws in many places now prohibit new freeway billboards.

“They are very expensive to get rid of. . . . It’s out of our price range,” lamented Paul Williams, the city’s planning director.

The county also has been unable to pick up the cost of buying out the billboards along its stretch of freeway. Although the county has not allowed a billboard to be erected along the Ventura Freeway since the mid-1970s, some older signs still are standing in Calabasas, the only unincorporated stretch along the freeway.

“If the state law had not protected them, we probably would have said, ‘Time to take your signs down, folks,’ ” said Louis Pera, the county’s zoning-enforcement supervisor. “You can’t do that now. It would cost millions of dollars.”

Congress set the precedent for compensating the billboard industry when it passed the much-heralded Highway Beautification Act of 1965, the outgrowth of Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign for national beautification. The former First Lady wanted to replace highway signs with flowers and trees. Only later did anti-billboard groups realize that the act made the sign industry even stronger.

Still, many signs have come down over the years. In California, local governments typically would amortize the value of a billboard over a several-year period to meet the federal requirement. The signs were ordered removed only when they were deemed valueless.

But, in 1983, after heavy lobbying by the billboard industry, the California Legislature passed a law requiring billboard companies to be paid for their signs immediately. Then a second law was passed denying local governments the right to order the removal of a billboard as a prerequisite for building on the property.

Critics attribute the billboard industry’s legislative success to its deep pockets. The industry is a major contributor to congressmen and California legislators, said John Miller, a director of the Coalition for Scenic Beauty, a national organization composed of such groups as the Sierra Club and the American Institute of Architects.

The timing of the two state laws was a disaster for the fledgling city of Agoura Hills when it came to getting rid of the billboards. Incorporated for only a short time, the city hadn’t had time to phase out the signs or eliminate them through the building-permit process when the laws were enacted.

So, for the most part, the billboards have remained in Agoura Hills.

“Sometimes people refer to us as the classified ads of the region,” complained Fran Pavley, an Agoura Hills councilwoman.

To the east and west, the City of Los Angeles and Ventura County outlawed signs along the Ventura Freeway long ago. And the developer who built the planned community of neighboring Westlake Village banished billboards from his property. Only in adjacent Calabasas do some signs still exist.

But the billboards are not without their supporters. Cigarette and liquor companies continue to use them to get their messages to the public. They are a favorite tool of home builders trying to entice motorists to visit their subdivisions.

Paschke said Agoura Hills residents might not be living there if the billboards didn’t exist.

“Most of the people who live there were directed to their homes because of the signs displayed by builders,” Paschke said.

And, although critics complain that the signs are eyesores that hurt property values, Paschke and others in the industry defend them as an invaluable form of communication. They say the signs should be protected as zealously as other forms of communication--from newspapers and magazines to television and radio.

But that kind of argument will never sway the Agoura Hills mayor.

On Thursday night, Koenig bumped into a lobbyist for the billboard industry at a League of California Cities dinner in Costa Mesa. After the introduction, he quipped to the young activist: “Does your mother know you do this in the evening?”