Creative Attack on Visual Clutter

Few things boil suburban blood quite like signs. The visual clutter of too many signs hawking everything from garage sales to Hollywood blockbusters has prompted municipal governments across northern Los Angeles County to adopt strict rules governing the size and placement of signs. But none has gone as far as Santa Clarita is considering. The city is so fed up with signs that it’s debating whether to go into the sign business itself.

City officials suggested last month that Santa Clarita buy several large billboards around town, lease them out for a few years and then tear them down. The idea is to eliminate unsightly signage without leaving an equally unsightly hole in the municipal budget. It’s a novel concept with lots of potential--and potential problems.

Regulating new signs is easy. A city can tell all new shopkeepers that their signs must be so high, so wide and fit with the character of the community. And it’s just as easy to ban new billboards. All it takes is a majority vote of the City Council--a snap since billboards seem to rankle view-minded community leaders most of all. Problems arise, however, when cities start tinkering with existing signs.

Agoura Hills found that out when it tried to force business owners along the Ventura Freeway to take down their towering pole-mounted signs. A nasty legal fight followed. In an effort to rid their town of pole signs, Calabasas officials gave owners 15 years to take their signs down. Billboards are even more problematic because they produce steady cash flows for their owners. Even though the number of billboards nationwide has dropped by half over the past 30 years, cities trying to regulate them out of existence often land in court.

The solution: Buy them. The problem: A single billboard can cost $100,000 or more. Santa Clarita’s plan would allow the city to recoup those costs over six to eight years by renting out the billboard to advertisers. After all the money was back in city coffers, the bulldozers would move in. Problem is, sometimes billboards carry ads that some residents find offensive. As a billboard owner, city officials would be in the awkward position of defending the free speech of advertisers their constituents might not like.

If nothing else, Santa Clarita’s sign proposal demonstrates a trait so often lacking in local government: innovation. Faced with a prickly problem that traditional tactics have so far failed to solve, Santa Clarita’s administrators and politicians attacked it from the flank. That kind of creative thinking is a positive sign.