LA Weekly

Many thanks to LA Weekly for helping to bring to light the grotesquely egregious behavior of the outdoor advertising industry in erecting hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal billboards across Los Angeles.

For those who wish to fight the illegal actions of the outdoor advertising industry in Los Angeles, please contact the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight. Your support and input are urgently needed:

CBBB
2700 Military Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(310) 474-1711
cbbbla@verizon.net

Only problem, Miss Stewart, is you've got the blame game all wrong: it's City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo's office who tipped off Clear Channel and who advises the City AND the Mayor, so if Building & Safety refused the request, it was at HIS request. Read the Daily News and L A Times/ David Zahniser stories on this; the former, DN, had articles AND a current Opinion on this. As Zahniser makes clear, Rocky has an unseemly tight relationship with Clear Channel/CBS Outdoors, which gave him almost $half million in free ads for his run for C/A (against anti-billboard, pro- community activist, Mike Feuer) and threw him a "thanks Rocky" lavish bash at a BH Hotel a few weeks ago. In FACT, the L A City Council ordered Rocky to provide the City and community with a list of their billboards and placement back in Jan. 07, but they did the opposite. This week's DN article notes Jack Weiss and Wendy Greuel are especially angry at how Rocky's mishandled this. -- See also, CityWatch/ Dennis Hathaway's article on background of how Rocky messed up his orders even more, and somehow tied Clear Channel's "right' to put up billboards on the westside, like along Santa Monica Blvd, in Century City (where the city paid Clear Channel to REMOVE billboards before their grand remake) to Clear Channel kicking a few bucks toward poor areas for parks. So now Jan Perry and Ed Reyes are at war with the Westside and CM Weiss. -- (Ed Reyes is on a general war path against the westside and hillsides: as David Zahniser, again, notes today, Reyes used the MLK truce/peace weekend as an excuse to attack "the hillside federations" for resisting his attempts to shove high-density, low-income projects of people from his district, into their neighborhoods. Attacked them for "putting property values ahead of social values," as though it were a crime for people to want to protect their homes from further erosion at this already difficult time!) The Mayor ISN'T the villain here!

Susan, thanks for the insightful comments on what's going on between Clear Channel, Delgadillo, Weiss and other power players. One correction: The other newspapers got it wrong when they reported that Rocky Delgadillo tipped off Clear Channel about our request for The List. Weekly reporter Christine Pelisek has already tracked down the Building and Safety worker who tipped Clear Channel, and who concedes to having done so. It makes for a great story, but alas, it wasn't Rocky Delgadillo who squealed.

Thanks, Jill. Hmmm....As someone in a West L A HOA near Century City, I've been following this: what about David Zahniser's report in his article 3/25, that Clear Channel gave Building & Safety the info in a form contrary to initial instructions, obfuscating the info further. I do know that this has been a big battle between Rocky and the City Council going back years, and they're not the ones responsible, since Rocky negotiated a deal contrary to their instructions in Jan. 07. Our HOA has been battling Clear Channel for years, but Rocky's deal with them was an end run; we're having to fight them all over again to prevent their putting billboards BACK up we paid them to take down in the first place, along Santa Monica Blvd.

On Jan. 31, 2007, the city council unanimously voted to direct the city attorney to strike any language in lawsuit settlements with billboard companies that would make their inventories "trade secrets" and not available to the public. The billboard companies agreed to these settlements, but then turned around and sued the city to keep the inventories secret anyway. So now the city is being asked to approve a special sign district to allow Clear Channel to put up billboards on the 10 freeway. Why would they make any sort of concession to this company that has shown its utter contempt for the public and the democratic process?

I am an employee in the industry. I do not work for Clear Channel. Here are a couple of facts: (1) CC has a right to know when someone is requesting information about their business via the open records laws. (2) The person(s) requesting the info should be able to receive it. However, they are not entitled to every detail (personal information, etc.)contained within the records.(3) If CC has knowingly built unpermitted structures illegally (which I doubt), they can be removed and CC should be fined. (4) CC does have a history of "playing dirty". Unlike other industry players who strive to be responsible corporate citizens, CC cares only about CC. They have no respect for the rest of the industry, and, absolutely no respect for community.

The only thing I'd like to add to the article is to point out that Clear Channel is far more than a billboard company. They own about half of the FM stations across the country & at least 50 television stations. They use the different branches to reinforce and leverage municipalities, communities, individuals and independently owned businesses.

Thank you for the great article.

Wow, although not a life or death issue, this is a critically important issue for quality of life, also as a ripe fat example of contemporary urban politico/corpro corruption. (Also infuriating that they are apparently plotting to focus in particular on my west l.a. neighborhood.)

And the neo-LAWeakly is covering it, via Jill Stewart, no less !

Great stuff like this, keep it coming, and I might revisit my increasingly waning opinion of my once-beloved LAWeekly.

Rocky and billboard companies has to be among the very few most infuriating developments in the city this decade.

Christine Pelisek's article published last night clarifies the confusion over who tattled to Clear Channel about the Weekly's request for the list: as Jill said, it was a Building & Safety employee, but as reported earlier, and quoted by Pelisek, Rocky's letter to Weiss and Greuel confirms that it was his office's advice that if city employees did NOT alert Clear Channel to such requests, the city could be sued. So the Building & Safety employee was following Rocky/ City Attorney's protocol. PLUS if all B & S had was boxes of stuff and "unusuble electronic info" (how could that be?), then maybe the employee was also seeking Clear Channel's help in getting something together on such short notice? -- Crazy that this has been going on since 2001, when Weiss first demanded the info. Then after the Courts squashed the info in 2002 (why, I can't imagine), in 2006 Weiss and the Council tried again, only to have Rocky come up with a contrary agreement. Which Clear Channel didn't honor -- so the city is losing some $300/sign inspection fees, for upto 11,000 signs! -- while Clear Channel demands its "right" to put up the "modernized" digital signs, that it's not willing to pay for. They should be sued for back monies owed and damages. -- What continues to irk me as a westsider is the way in which WE

(cont.) ...way in which WE're somehow being portrayed as the "bad guys" by Councilmembers Reyes and Perry, because Clear Channel won't give them the money for parks they want. There should be NO quid pro quo between allowing Clear Channel to trash the Westside or ANY area and their "generosity" to the inner city. Reyes, Perry etc. shouldn't be tricked into playing racial politics by a giant corporation which is fleecing the city.

For those who wish to fight the illegal actions of the outdoor advertising industry in Los Angeles, please contact the Coalition to Ban Billboard Blight.

Your support and input are urgently needed:

CBBB
2700 Military Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90064
(310) 474-1711
cbbbla@verizon.net

Anybody out there think Crocky Delgadildo is a good city attorney? I think he is dishonest and weak and gutless. Just look at the Tenny Pierce dogfood case. If he is afraid he will lose, he farms it out to an outside attorney who settles. This way Rocky doesn't look like the loser he is..