This Is Southern California--Where Are the Billboards?

Dear Street Smart:

Why is there such a conspicuous lack of large billboards alongside Orange County freeways? As I commute from my home in Laguna Beach to my job in Burbank, I have noticed that on the San Diego Freeway going north the first billboard is near the Cherry Avenue exit in Long Beach. On the Santa Ana Freeway, the first one is just north of The City Drive in Orange. I am not referring to the smaller rooftop signs on businesses, but to the large ones that are leased and changed periodically. At first I thought it must be some sort of county ordinance, but this “billboard free zone” doesn’t seem to correlate to the county borders. I think it’s wonderful, but curious . . . any explanation?

Jess Bushyhead

Laguna Beach

Orange County has fewer freeway billboards than some neighboring areas because more of the county’s freeways are in residential areas, Caltrans spokeswoman Maureena Duran-Rojas said.

The placing of billboards on private or city-owned land near freeways is regulated by cities, which tend to allow more of them in commercial and industrial areas than in residential ones.

Under both state and federal law, no billboards are allowed on Caltrans property along freeways.

Dear Street Smart:

We got our names in for the “environmental” whale car license tags. If the whale tags are issued before our present tags expire in September, will the DMV allow a refund for the months not used on the old tags?

Donald Sison

Irvine

The $50 you paid for the whale license plate, a special edition to raise money for coastal and environmental projects, is not your car registration fee. That is separate.

Special edition plates generally cost a one-time fee of $30 to $50, according to William Madison, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.

Then, beginning the year after you buy them, they result in an annual increase of $15 to $40 in the cost of renewing the registration of your car. Most of that extra money goes to the projects designated to benefit from the plates.

In your case, Madison said, the added cost will be $40 per year beginning with your registration renewal in September 1998.

The whale plates can be purchased by phone from the state Coastal Commission, and all callers are supposed to be told of the annual registration increase, said Amy Winderope, an education coordinator for the commission. The plates also can be purchased at local offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles, where the amount of the renewal fee is stated on the application.

In the rush of orders before the end of 1996, however, some customers ordering the plates from the commission may have been misinformed, Winderope said.

“In the last three days of the year, we got something like 3,000 orders,” she said. “We had everyone in the Coastal Commission answering the phone. When you have that many people involved, there’s bound to be human error.”

If you don’t want to keep the plates, a DMV spokesman said, you can simply tell the DMV when the $40 increase comes due. They will issue you standard plates, and you will return the old ones.

“We can’t force them to have the plates,” spokesman Evan Nossoff said.

Dear Street Smart:

Could you help secure the resurfacing of Heil Avenue between Saybrook Lane and Edwards Street in Huntington Beach? This was scheduled at least once in 1996. Nothing happened. There is one section where no sidewalk exists, hence no paving. Can’t this be fixed for residents who use this street? I think traffic counters will show this to be a heavily traveled area. Thank you for any help you can render.

Gerald M. Levin

Huntington Beach

Unfortunately, there is no money in the city’s budget for such a project, according to city officials.

“It’s probably our worst section of arterial highway,” city engineer Bob Eichblatt admits. “That section is going down the tubes, and we have zero budget for resurfacing arterial highways.”

By early this summer, Eichblatt said, his department expects to present the City Council with a complete outline of Huntington Beach’s capital improvement needs, including the resurfacing of that area, a project that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“This will identify the funding shortfall,” Eichblatt said of the report, which his department has been working on for 2 1/2 years. “It will show what the problems are, what the available funding will be over the next 20 years and how much the shortfall is.”

Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about traffic, commuting and what makes it difficult to get around in Orange County. Include simple sketches if helpful. Letters may be published in upcoming columns. Please write to David Haldane, c/o Street Smart, The Times Orange County Edition, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, send faxes to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail him at David.Haldane@latimes.com. Include your full name, address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited, and no anonymous letters will be accepted.