Someone stop them!? Anyone? There are over 4,000 illegal billboards in LA and no one seems to be doing much about it. They’ve warned, they’ve threatened, and after 5 months of not being listened to, nothing has happened. This is mainly because LA doesn’t have the resources to crack down on the billboard companies which appear to be springing up like acne on a 13-year-old boy. Mayor Richard Riordan, Mayor James Hahn, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have all been unable to do anything to stop the sign moguls.
So pathetic is the battle against outdoor advertising companies that the massive billboard went unnoticed for months by leaders at City Hall, including big-time billboard proponent and council member Ed Reyes, in whose district the sign sits. It was left to irritated commuters, like pissed-off clutter critic Dennis Hathaway, who spoke up at a January public hearing, where city engineer Eric Cabrera called L.A. Outdoor’s ballsy stunt an “egregious disregard of the law.”
It seems that officials are powerless over the billboard industry which appears to be doing what they want, when they want.
The mayor and Los Angeles City Council have let the billboard industry flout the law in this case, a flat-out 2002 ban on new billboards so openly that activists in other big cities laugh out loud when they hear the latest tales.
Indeed, for its crime, L.A. Outdoor was “cited” and “ordered” to take down the illegal billboard “immediately.” Five months later, that billboard still looms large. City Hall has caved to outdoor advertisers for so many years that L.A. Outdoor is touting the illegal billboard in a photo array on its Web site a bleak reminder that billboards run amuck here, and their owners enjoy impunity.
But billboard companies seem to have decided it’s better to take a slap on the wrist, turn the other way, and collect their checks, than listen to officials.
“I have gone past the outrage phase. Now, it is just absurd,” says critic Hathaway, pointing to the 60-foot-high tanker-truck-sized billboard near Albany Street and 12th Place, south of downtown. “It’s obvious that companies feel it’s worth the cost, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.”
What cost? Billboard companies reap roughly $14,000 a month in easy money from a double-sided standard-size 14-by-48-foot billboard that costs about $50,000 to $80,000 to build. And they earn up to $128,000 monthly from “digital” billboards, oil wells in the sky that, when fully leased with ads, will earn $1.34 billion a year for L.A.’s billboard giants. These riches will flow to the very firms that have vociferously fought paying a single penny into an annual, modest, $186-per-billboard municipal fee which their lawyers hammered down from $314.
Meanwhile…
Department of Building and Safety officials don’t even enforce the $186 “inspection fee” on each legal and illegal billboard enacted six long years ago under the Hahn administration and long resisted by several firms.
LA just appears to be to wide-spread of a city to be able to control.
Unlike Houston, Philadelphia, Tucson and San Francisco, in L.A., big and small outdoor advertisers often ignore the ban on new billboards or blatantly blow past restrictions on their existing signs illegally doubling the size, or adding a second face.
And just to add to the problem. Many of these billboards are not being put in properly.
The bizarre lawlessness has gone on so long City Hall has no idea if the estimated 4,000 illegal billboards are even safe.
Billboard activist Hathaway says that, in a normal world, “an inspector would have had to look at the excavation and sign off before any concrete was poured. There’s no way to know if it has the proper structural integrity and won’t topple onto the freeway.”
So what do you say LA?
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Photo by Marlith
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