Billboards Gone Wild: 4,000 Illegal Billboards Choke L.A.'s Neighborhoods

The graying and affable twosome, two modest Davids up against wealthy, multinational Goliaths, are chatting at a Maui Wowi restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, just below a billboard that, unknown to most neighbors, will soon glow with ultrabright, constantly changing digital ads visible far down the boulevard. Says Wu: “There are a couple of more things that will make your hair stand up.”

While other cities launched highly effective billboard crackdowns, Los Angeles was mired in petty City Council rivalries. Braude’s final effort to ban new billboards, for instance, lost during an 8-7 decision, with ticked-off Councilman Nate Holden acting as the swing “no” vote.

Rena Kosnett

Dennis Hathaway protests the half-mil Delgadillo took from billboard giants.

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More About

• Ted Wu
• Rocky Delgadillo
• Jack Weiss
• Politics
• Outdoor Advertising

As Holden recently told the Weekly, “Braude had just shafted me” on an issue unrelated to billboards. Holden giggles wickedly as he recalls, “They were putting in all these monstrosities. Those big apartment buildings ... I said, ‘Let’s not destroy the neighborhood and let’s have a moratorium and change the ordinance.’ ”

But “Braude and [Councilman Michael] Woo, the so-called environmentalists, were the two people who voted against” Holden. “I thought [Braude] was a hypocrite, so I voted against [the ban on billboards]. These damn hypocrites — I will teach you!”

Meanwhile more organized cities like Houston, and Jacksonville, Florida, took the lead. In 1980, Houston banned billboards after local newspaper articles dubbed it the “ugliest city in America” thanks to its sea of 10,000 billboards. “We were so ugly, we couldn’t get businesses to relocate to Houston,” remembers Margaret Lloyd, policy adviser for the Scenic Houston movement. “It was simply because we had the vision in the ’80s to stop it.”

A similar movement grew in Jacksonville, where residents overwhelmingly voted to ban new billboards in 1987. Despite a booming population and new development, the city is far less cluttered than it was 21 years ago, because it has 1,000 fewer billboards.

In 2001, Councilman Jack Weiss called for a yearly billboard-inspection fee on billboard owners, which would finance a long-overdue city inventory of thousands of the signs bristling along the streets.

Weiss had some pretty simple questions: Who owned them? Which ones were illegal?

But Weiss, a former assistant U.S. Attorney, proved no match for the ossified L.A. bureaucracy. Department of Building and Safety general manager Andrew Adelman, hired in 1997, was employing just two inspectors to police billboards across 469 square miles of territory.

“The building department said, ‘We are vigorously enforcing the sign laws in the city,’ ” Wu notes. “A couple of us looked at each other and almost choked.”

Now, L.A. — whose $7 billion budget includes the highest city council salaries in the U.S., at $171,000 — employs just three billboard inspectors.

In response to criticism, Adelman’s inspectors in 1999 tried to survey a single stretch of Pico Boulevard. Five years later, during one of the many lawsuits brought by billboard companies to stop the city from regulating them, an attorney for Clear Channel Outdoor asked about it. Inspector David Keim couldn’t recall how many signs on Pico were illegal — or provide proof of how the department estimated that 40 percent of L.A.’s boards were illegal. Keim admitted that the city “database” was completely incapable of tracking violations.

A 2001 Building and Safety report called for hiring nearly 50 new city workers — including 39 inspectors — to help shut down the wave of illegal billboards. At the time, building officials openly admitted that it took them two hours to track down a single permit in their byzantine filing system.

That was seven years ago. Today, the estimated time to track down a single permit in City Hall’s files? Two hours.

L.A.’s predicament is a lesson in how money — and threats of lawsuits — definitely talks in politics. In 2001, the same year Adelman said L.A. needed 39 billboard inspectors, outdoor-advertising companies donated more than $400,000 in billboard space touting “Rocky Delgadillo for City Attorney.” Billboard opponent Mike Feuer, challenging Delgadillo for the city attorney’s job, lost. In other years, gigantic ads promoting Mayor James Hahn and council candidates Tony Cardenas and Jan Perry also appeared.

Now a state assemblyman, Feuer recalls, “There were obviously political consequences to be paid for fighting billboards.”

The city has spent huge sums on underground wiring and landscaped medians to beautify streets. Yet from Reseda and Palms to Boyle Heights and Echo Park, cruddy billboards seem to make those efforts pointless. Miscikowski, an art collector who lives in a beautiful enclave in Brentwood, believed Angelenos did not want to live with so much ugliness. She successfully pushed through the 2002 billboard ban, but it allows a major exception that is now coming home to roost: the special “sign districts” like those proposed by Reyes and Wesson.

Under the 2002 ban, it looked like Los Angeles was going to go after the blight. The city even hired 20 billboard inspectors. But a month later, outdoor advertisers Vista Media, Regency, CBS Outdoor and Clear Channel Outdoor won a federal injunction to stop the inspection program, on the grounds that it violated their constitutional rights and that the $314 fee was excessive. The 20 billboard inspectors vanished.