BANNER/40″/mike1st/mark2nd

By HOWARD FINE

Staff Reporter

It seemed like such a good idea: Allow colorful banners on street lights all over Los Angeles to promote concerts, community events and art exhibits an inexpensive way to get the word out on various non-profit doings around Los Angeles.

So why are 1,000 banners promoting ABC and several hundred more promoting the Dodgers flying all over Los Angeles and why will they stay in place until the end of September, even though city officials concede that the ABC banners are illegal?

How could such a well-meaning community-minded adornment turn into such an unmitigated mess?

“The analogy I can make is the old story about the camel in the tent,” said Assistant City Attorney Christopher Westhoff. “First the camel sticks its nose in the tent. Then, meeting no resistance, it sticks its head in, then its neck. Pretty soon you are lying down next to a camel.”

In this case, banners that stretched the limits of the ordinance were approved, laying the groundwork for more commercial banners. Throw in staff changes and lack of communication among city departments and you have the recipe for confusion and lax enforcement that resulted in the policy meltdown.

For now, the City Council has slapped a 30-day moratorium on all new banners until it reviews its policy and issues new guidelines next month. That leaves events like next month’s Black Business Expo out in the cold.

“We paid for and printed 100 banners for the expo,” said Isidra Person-Lynn, media director for the Sept. 10-12 event. “It cost us a total of $8,000, including the $4,600 in permit fees. But because of the moratorium, we have not been allowed to put any of them up.”

Person-Lynn has resorted to asking one of the event’s sponsors, Ralphs Grocery Co., to put up some of the banners in the parking lots at its supermarkets.

The two events most responsible for establishing banners as an effective means of promotion were the Treasures of Tutankhamen exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the late ’70s and the 1984 Summer Olympics.

But in recent years, the light-pole banners have become increasingly commercial.

“Look at the Hollywood Bowl banners,” said one council aide. “The event may be community-oriented, but it’s edging closer to the line.”

At first, this source said, most of the sponsors’ names or logos were inconspicuous. But over time, they have become more prominent. And because they were almost always approved, it became increasingly difficult to turn them down for being “too commercial” (especially if they were only slightly different than the ones that had been previously approved).

Another council aide said that figuring out what was too commercial was a “big gray area” that no one ever really got a handle on.

One crucial example from last year: the Dodgers approached the city about posting banners for the team’s 40th anniversary in Los Angeles. Even though the team is a purely commercial venture, the banners were approved by the City Council because the 40th anniversary was deemed “in the community interest” and hundreds of banners went up around town.

Once the Dodgers’ banners had been approved, it became that much harder to say no when the team resubmitted its application this year. The permit was granted and the banners went up again and are still up.

Commercial advertisers are hardly to blame for pushing the envelope, especially since the city charges only $46 to hang a banner for 60 days (a single commercial billboard ad costs several thousand dollars a month).

“It’s far more cost-effective to advertise on light-pole banners than a billboard,” said Craig Furst, vice president of AAA Flag & Banner, one of a handful of banner-making companies in the L.A. area. “You only have one billboard in a single location, while you can have a mile-long stretch of banners (for the same cost). Any company would be interested in having its name on the streets of L.A.”

James Washington, chief inspector of the Bureau of Street Services, confirmed that the number of applications for banners with commercial content has been steadily increasing. “But the final decisions are up to the City Attorney,” said Washington.

Or are they?

In true local government fashion, the banner fiasco has led to a flurry of finger-pointing over who is responsible.

City Council staffers blame the Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Street Services and the City Attorney’s Office for not adequately enforcing the ordinance.

The City Attorney’s Office blames both the City Council and the Bureau of Street Services for not communicating with each other plus, it blames the council for granting so many banner fee waivers.

Bureau of Street Services officials are blaming the system, which they say requires too many officials from too many different departments to look over the permits.

About the only thing everyone at City Hall agrees on is that the ABC banners are illegal. But at least the commercial banners are putting a few bucks into city coffers, right? Well, not always.

The City Council had always waived banner fees for certain non-profit or community groups with limited budgets. And there was little objection to the practice, since much of the time the waivers amounted to a couple hundred dollars to hang a handful of banners for a week or two.

But with the citywide ad campaigns that followed in the wake of the 1984 Olympics, hundreds of banners started going up, meaning thousands of dollars in fees were being waived.

Although each waiver had to be approved by the council, they became routine. For the year ended June 30, 1998, banner fee waivers reached $629,000. And in fiscal 1999, the city waived $1.6 million in banner fees, according to the Bureau of Street Services.

That skyrocketing amount drew concern from some at City Hall.

“We’ve been trying for the last seven years to get the waiver policy reviewed,” said Raul Bocanegra, deputy for Councilwoman Rita Walters. (Like many council members last week during the council’s summer recess, Walters was unavailable for comment.) “It was one thing for a small community group to get a waiver, but when you start talking about waiving thousands of dollars in fees for the Grammys and the Emmys, it’s another matter. The councilwoman soon became very frustrated with all the fee waivers and who was getting the waivers.”

Meanwhile, there were changes in how permission was sought to hang banners. In earlier days, representatives from the entities themselves would get the permits or appear before the council seeking a fee waiver. But in recent years, the banner companies have taken on this role. And with those same banner reps seeking permits and fee waivers, the approvals became even more routine.

“Back at the time of the Olympics, most banner companies were mom-and-pop-type of operations,” said Gary Boze, an aide to Councilwoman Laura Chick. “Now you can do things faster and cheaper, with amazing effects. Banners have evolved into a sophisticated method of advertising.”

Meanwhile, the approval process became more convoluted. In April 1998, the council passed a measure allowing individual members to approve banners in their own districts, as long as the total fees were under $2,000 and the banners would hang for 30 days or less.

While this was intended to simplify the process, there were few clear channels of communication between city staff and the council offices.

When the applications were sent back to staff to grant the permits, Bureau of Street Services staff took the council’s decisions as approvals, he said.

“If the council had already approved a banner application, there was no reason to go back and double check to make sure it complied with the ordinance,” said Westhoff. “After all, it’s the council that has the final say.”

Then earlier this year, one of the longtime inspectors at the Bureau of Street Services, Jonathan Roberts, retired. There also were some shuffling of duties at the City Attorney’s Office.

“You now have different people enforcing the ordinance who may not have been all that familiar with it,” said Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton. “The administration of the ordinance got more lax.”

Possibly, but it was also complicated by the sheer number of people and departments involved, said Washington.

“The weakness is that the more people you get involved in the process, the greater the chance for error,” Washington said. “Each one is looking at different things and they haven’t been talking to one another.”

The capper on the ABC fiasco: The city has refunded the $46-per-banner fee so its 1,000 network banners are now flying for free.