California and the West

For a city in such a beautiful natural setting, we surely have made a mess of it. More than 7,000 billboards obscure Los Angeles’ views of the mountains and hills, big video screens flash ads at us, inflatable gorillas float high above car lots.

If you think visual blight has worsened in recent years, it has. More billboards, more advertisements of all sorts. With the economy strong, companies have more money to plug their products. Ad technology also has changed. Previously, each billboard ad was pasted up in strips. Now the entire ad is stretched across the billboard frame, a much faster process and one that allows the ad to be reused at other sites. The result is a visual shouting match, each sign screaming with bolder graphics and more provocative pictures.

Other cities--Culver City, Chula Vista and El Monte among them--are starting to get a grip on this problem by imposing strict limits on new billboards. Los Angeles could, and should, be next.

On Tuesday, the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee adopted two far-reaching motions. One calls for an interim control ordinance that would ban the installation of new billboards within city limits. The ordinance, which has yet to be drafted, could go before the committee and then the full council for final approval as early as mid-December.

The second motion is the more ambitious. It calls on the city attorney’s office and other city agencies to draft an ordinance requiring the removal of existing billboards--an estimated 1,000 in the first two years. In exchange for the removals, billboard companies would be permitted to erect new signs, but many fewer of them and only in industrial areas adjacent to freeways. Because of the high vehicle traffic, these sites are particularly lucrative. Under this plan, 10 billboards would have to come down for every new sign erected.

Details on which signs would be removed, whether the sign companies would be compensated and who would get to erect new ones are still to be decided by a task force, now at work. The choices undoubtedly will raise complex questions of equity for the sign companies as well as for residents in communities inundated with the in-your-face advertising. These details will certainly be critical to winning cooperation from the sign companies.

This initiative, if approved, promises to spur action, now under discussion, to curb large mural ads attached to buildings, inflatable ads and the growing number of video-screen ads.

The City Council has for too long sat back while unfettered advertising junked up the city. It’s time to restore some balance, to clear the lines of sight so we can get a good look at our remarkable surroundings.