L.A.'s Ten-year Fight Against Billboards

Department of Building and Safety was established. The only task of the 20 inspectors was to determine which billboards were legally permitted and safe, and which weren't. The outdoor advertising companies would be charged $314 per billboard per year to pay the inspectors to do their work. However, thanks to the lacking fund and City Council's refusal to act, it took seven years to launch the survey.

The city adopted a sign ordinance that banned the building of new billboards and assigned a group of 20 inspectors to identify the existing illegal billboards.

Negotiated by former City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and soon approved by City Council, the settlement allowed Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor to “modernize” - in fact, transform to digital - up to 840 billboards, while only 98 static signs were required to be removed - 3% of their inventory.

Billboard competitor Summit Media sued the city, alleging that the 2006 settlement in effect exempted the two companies from city zoning laws that other firms were required to follow.

Superior Court ruled in favor of Summit and invalidated the 2006 agreement. Judge Terry Green called the hasty 2006 deal "poison" and ruled that the City Council had illegally exempted CBS and Clear Channel from the city's ban on digital billboards.

City Council passed a whopping 12 percent tax on any purchase of billboard ad space. $24 million is expected to be funneled into the city's General Fund in the first year alone — 25 times more than the city had wanted from its inspection fee.

City Council members Ed Reyes and Paul Krekorian “authored” Morrie Goldman, a lobbyist for Clear Channel, to quietly ghostwrite a motion that could help the company preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in digital billboard business, and allow the cash-hungry city to capture a portion of sign revenues as well.

The motion filed by councilmen Ed Reyes and Paul Krekorian, which could lead to legal protections for existing digital billboards and potentially allow more to be installed, was passed by the council on an 11-3 vote - just two weeks before a court ruling that might force the elimination of 100 digital signs.

The California 2nd District Court of Appeal issued a tentative ruling, indicating that it is leaning toward unleashing its guillotine on the 100 digital billboards by ruling them illegal.

The Department of Building and Safety finally got its job done - 10 years after the billboard survey was ordered. It posted the location and permit status of every billboard structure in the city. An early analysis shows that nearly 10 percent have no permit on file and roughly a third of the 5,874 billboard structures have "observable violations."