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

“They didn’t even get a chance to start,” Hathaway recalls. “They hired the people, then — bam! — the companies found a sympathetic judge.”

But then the federal Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed the judge, ruling that the billboard firms failed to show that a “fee” increase would cause them “constitutional harm.” It was the biggest victory against the billboard industry in Los Angeles, opening the way to finally create a list of lawless billboards and shut down the practice.

Ted Soqui

Flipping off City Hall: L.A. Outdoor’s illegal billboard is accented by sneakers signifying drugs are sold nearby.

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More About

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

But Delgadillo, Hahn and, later, Villaraigosa, wimped out. Instead of holding the billboard companies’ feet to the fire with an effective fee, inspection plan and crackdown, Delgadillo agreed to “settlement” meetings with high-powered billboard-industry attorneys. Those meetings led to a new megadeal that heaps rewards on a select few billboard companies.

The deals with Vista, Clear Channel, CBS and Regency mystified experts in the billboard wars, setting off rampant speculation since 2005 that city leaders are shills for billboard companies, and that Delgadillo has been corrupted by accepting free billboard ads promoting his campaign.

“The city settled with the industry even though they were winning in the courts,” recalls Kevin Fry, president of Scenic America, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit advocacy group. From the outside, it appeared that Delgadillo had lost control of the talks, then agreed to concessions that, Fry says, “had nothing to do with the original issue in the lawsuit. [The lawsuit the city won] was about fees.” But “the settlement went way beyond that.”

One of the more incredible terms approved by Delgadillo, the City Council and Villaraigosa gives two billboard companies six years to take down just 98 nuisance billboards — just 3 percent of their inventory.

The billboard owners were even allowed to choose those they wanted to get rid of, Fry says. “It was so minuscule.... The billboard companies will take out the least-performing, least-profitable signs. We found the settlement unsettling — and bizarre.”

Delgadillo and the City Council buckled even further, slashing the inspection fee to $186 per structure. Moreover, the deal rewards misbehavior by CBS, Clear Channel and others by grandfathering in an unknown number of illegal billboards that were standing before 1986. Gary Mobley, an attorney representing smaller firms who got no such deal, calls the Villaraigosa administration’s decision to look the other way “insidious” and “unconscionable.”

But the biggest coup was the quiet move by Delgadillo, the City Council and the mayor, still widely unknown to L.A. residents, to let the offending companies “modernize” 877 billboards by transforming them into highly lucrative, controversial, ultrabright LED displays.

The deal will affect scores of neighborhoods, introducing large LED signs said to be visible even through drawn curtains. The agreement was reached so quietly that even Wu, Hathaway and Silver — the Davids fighting the giants — heard about it too late to stop it.

As Delgadillo and the City Council met behind closed doors in late 2006, in fact, Dennis Hathaway was getting ready to personally test the city’s archaic billboard-policing system. His modest goal? To discover the “permit status” of 120 billboards jammed along one of L.A.’s ugliest streets, Lincoln Boulevard between Marina del Rey and Santa Monica. After spending six hours wading through microfiche at the Department of Building and Safety offices on Figueroa Street and finding just two permits on Lincoln, Hathaway gave up.

“There are cases in which a billboard appears to be at one address, and there’s no permit listed for that address, but for a nearby address, which doesn’t appear to have any billboard,” Hathaway says.

Outraged by the closed-door settlement and years of apathy from Building and Safety boss Adelman and the City Council, Wu, Silver and Hathaway formed the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight in 2006. Their goal was to raise money to challenge the settlements that are ushering in digital billboards and grandfathering in an unknown number of illegal, pre-1986 billboards. They filed a lawsuit last year but lost when the judge ruled that “residents of the city don’t have an economic interest,” says Wu , frowning at the memory. “All of those formal filings cost us almost $15,000. It is a situation that you need a lot of money [to fight]. Our enemy has very deep pockets, so they can go on forever.”

The settlements required very, very little of the billboard owners: They were supposed to hand over, at long last, “the List” — the addresses of their legal and illegal billboards and other minor concessions.

But the City Council soon learned that Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor were insisting on keeping the inventory list out of the public’s hands, claiming the sign locations were a trade secret. Greuel and Weiss were peeved over such arrogance from big firms that had just received a billion-dollar windfall from City Hall in the form of digital-billboards approvals. So, led by Weiss and Greuel, the council declared in January 2007 that the List was not a trade secret.