Billboard Sleight of Hand

Take a good, long look at the spectacular vistas that ring Los Angeles, hills and snow-capped mountains, views for the most part still unobscured from our freeways. A City Council committee may take action today that could all but obliterate these L.A. postcards, putting them behind a forest of huge double-sided billboards.

What began late last year as a welcome effort to thin out the city’s ugly thicket of more than 7,000 billboards may be veering off course. The council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee is slated to discuss--and could possibly approve--the outlines of an ordinance that would permit dozens of giant billboards along local freeways, some within 200 feet of roadways. The present setback requirement is 600 feet.

In exchange, the outdoor advertisers would agree to take down 20 existing signs for every new one they put up. That sounds good, but without details on how the proposal would be implemented or significant public input on the plan, here’s what could happen: The billboard companies would decide which signs they would remove in order to erect the enormous 800-square-foot ones. They could, for example, swap small four-by-eight-foot billboards in out-of-the-way locations, signs that command a fraction of the revenue of the giant ads that now loom over some neighborhoods. Without stringent guidelines, the sign companies could try to “trade in” billboards they erected illegally; there are so many of these that the city can’t even make an accurate count, let alone have them removed. The companies could also swap old single-sided signboards for the double-sided monsters.

The result: Forget efforts to improve this city’s views. Instead, look for much worse visual blight as giant signs compete for attention. Actually, the proposal originated with billboard companies that coveted the lucrative freeway space. The city should at least take advantage of their commercial interest to get real reductions elsewhere in return.

A task force, including city officials and billboard company representatives, has been meeting to draft a formula for swapping old signs for new ones in a way that would not clutter views. The planning committee should wait for that task force’s report rather than move forward now.

In the meantime, the committee and the full council should extend the moratorium on new billboards that it imposed in December, hold the sign companies to it and get rid of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of illegal billboards now stationed across the city. Those measures would really make a difference.