Mike Feuer Proposes Statewide Digital Billboard Ban
In a strong rebuke of the Los Angeles City Council, which did not conduct a single discussion of safety issues before approving hundreds of digital billboards that have now begun to sweep across Los Angeles, California State Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles) proposed a law Friday to ban LED billboards until 2012.
Feuer's law would halt the dramatic digital transformation which has begun hitting unsuspecting neighborhoods in Los Angeles -- and to give city leaders two years' breathing room to await the outcome of three highway studies into the potential traffic hazards pose by the distracting, brightly-lit screens.
Until basic safety research is completed by state and federal officials, "It is premature, certainly, for these digital billboards to sprout up all over California," says Feuer.
City Council members had quietly approved over 800 digital billboards for virtually every neighborhood of L.A. The most controversial have appeared in Silver Lake, the Hollywood Hills and around Westwood, where furious residents are demanding they be stopped and removed.
Feuer's entry into the billboard wars is freighted with irony. He himself is a former Los Angeles councilman, who lost a bid to become City Attorney in 2001 to Rocky Delgadillo -- a loss some say was partly due to the pro-billboard Delgadillo taking more than $400,000 in free billboard space from outdoor advertising companies who slappedDelgadillo's smiling face across the city.
Feuer is asking questions never asked by the City Council, which has gained a reputation for helping turn L.A. into the capital of the illegal billboard industry: "What happens if the study is complete and they find they are dangerous? That would be a bad outcome. They are already up. It would be very expensive. At that point, one has to deal with how to get rid of them. It would be very costly...Why would we want billboards to proliferate only to learn that there is a great danger to people?"
Feuer says the moratorium would apply to all roads and highways in Los Angeles and California. The moratorium - if passed - would also prevent Clear Channel Outdoor from proceeding with its widely derided idea to place commercial ads on freeway Amber Alert signs.
One of the three digital billboard-safety studies is being conducted by the Federal Highway Administration, which has launched a multimillion-dollar study to find out whether the changing electronic messages pose a road hazard.
Last month, the City Council approved a three-month moratorium after digital billboards began popping up from Baldwin Heights to Venice and community residents became enraged. The moratorium is supposed to be used by city bureaucrats to strengthen weak billboard regulations.
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