City of Los Angeles attacks both free speech and property rights

Property rights have largely vanished everywhere (thanks in part to the Kelo case) but free speech protections might yet stop the local Hitlers. The excuse that an electronic billboard is a fire hazard sounds very phony. If that were so why not pursue the matter under fire regulations? Advertising is part of business and I think that hatred of business is the real motive. Billboards may be unsightly but if people were allowed to ban everything they saw as unsightly, there would not be much left. Leftists talk big about tolerance but practicing it is only for others, apparently.

" The city of Los Angeles has opened a new front in its longstanding battle with billboard companies, ordering building owners to remove so-called super-graphic signs, enormous advertisements draped across multistory structures, after deeming them fire hazards. Los Angeles city officials said the signs, made mostly of vinyl, had proliferated since December, when the City Council passed a temporary ban on billboards and large signs. The stopgap move was an effort to give the city more time to close loopholes in a 2002 law intended to curtail billboard advertisements, the NY Times reports.

Jack Weiss, a city councilman who wrote the temporary ordinance, said the original legislation was supposed to put a stop to the super-graphic signs. "Instead, the super-graphic companies have plastered their signs up all over the city and are thumbing their noses at the law," he said, reports Times writer Rebecca Cathcart. "Many of these signs are dangerous," he added. "They prevent people from getting out in case of fire, or firefighters from getting in."

The Fire Department estimates that more than 100 buildings from downtown to the coast have illegal signs. Inspectors have ordered 20 building owners to remove large signs, Weiss said, and will continue to issue warnings. A violation of the billboard ordinance carries a maximum monthly fine of $2,500. But Weiss said the signs could bring in $100,000 in rent for building owners.

The city has been blocked from enforcing the 2002 law because of legal entanglements, including lawsuits by billboard companies over free-speech rights.

Source

An amusing footnote: The new attention-getting advertising technology of yesteryear was neon signs, many of which people came to like. But a lot of the old ones have now been taken down in L.A. so, guess what? Los Angeles now has a museum for old neon signs where you can go and see them still working! Yet the busybodies of yesteryear probably wanted to ban them too.