Why Ugly Signs Spread

People detest the billboards hulking over their streets. The City of Los Angeles gets no ongoing revenue from the unsightly signs. Zero. All it gets is a pathetically modest one-time permit fee. So why is the City Council bent on letting even more of them go up in ever more intrusive places?

The answer is politics, as usual. Loophole-ridden state and local ethics laws have allowed the billboard industry to become the 800-pound gorilla crashing about town, doing pretty much as it pleases. Campaign contributions in the form of billboard advertising helped push Mayor-elect James K. Hahn and City Atty.-elect Rocky Delgadillo to victory last week. Delgadillo alone received $425,000 in free billboard advertising, so-called independent expenditures that evade campaign spending limits.

But long before this campaign, the outdoor advertisers were bankrolling most sitting council members, adding to their officeholder accounts and underwriting reelection fund-raisers. Little wonder council members can’t summon the nerve to say enough is enough.

Last week, council members expressed their gratitude to the billboard barons by approving an ordinance that will let 70 more of those gigantic, double-sided monstrosities go up along local freeways. In exchange, the sign companies promise to remove a few signs for each new one they erect. But the advertisers, not the city, will choose which ones come down. They can dismantle their smallest, least-profitable signs in exchange for the hugely lucrative freeway billboards. Council members rejected a better motion that would have directed city officials to curb the mushrooming illegal billboards before permitting any new signs to sprout.

Today, a council committee could do even more damage. Before the Public Works Committee is a motion to allow signs on construction walls and the sides of strip malls and other buildings--locations that have been off-limits to commercial advertising. This two-year pilot project is really an effort by the billboard companies to get a toehold in the last advertising frontier. With an estimated 10,000 billboards now cluttering the city, even advertisers worry that streets may be so crowded with signs that new ones will get lost. Leading the charge on this motion are council members Mike Hernandez and Nate Holden, decriers of billboard blight who, like most of their council colleagues, have accepted money from the billboard companies.

Outgoing Councilman Joel Wachs, a man reputed for his refined visual aesthetic, chairs the Public Works Committee. Maybe he’ll be able to get past the contributions he’s taken from billboard companies. .

Last week’s council action will make the city uglier. The signs-on-walls motion would let the ugliness spread to virgin territory.