The city of Los Angeles does not love billboards.

In fact, the City Council has in recent years been tightening restrictions on outdoor advertising to avoid the kind of “visual blight” that some believe characterizes cities like West Hollywood.

Which leaves many scratching their heads, wondering how a Koreatown building owner managed to get approval for a giant video billboard along Wilshire Boulevard.

As it turns out, the sign is likely to be the first and last one in the city of Los Angeles.

The sign went up March 5 at 3640 Wilshire Blvd. and is the biggest video billboard in the county, measuring 24 feet by 34 feet. It’s twice as big as the Videotron on Sunset Boulevard, in billboard-friendly West Hollywood.

Hanil Development Inc. put the video billboard atop its Aroma Wilshire Center a $20 million, 120,000-square-foot project set to open in September. The development is a private club for well-heeled folks who are attracted to a day spa, fitness gym, swimming pool and golfing range, with a food court and retail shops.

The video screen is for the project’s own use, to advertise its facilities, according to Hyun Park, the project’s assistant manager. Park said 10 percent of the sign’s content will consist of public announcements for the city. “That was our voluntary suggestion,” she said.

The process to get approval for the sign took more than two years of negotiating with the city Building and Safety Commission, according to Park.

“The city doesn’t allow for any kind of flashing or moving signs, so we had committee hearings to get permission through the ‘significant modification rule,'” Park said. “Since it was a drastic change, we put together a proposal where we presented the sign as our own aesthetic element of the project.”

James Usui, senior structural engineer in charge of the city Building and Safety board staff, got the modification proposals, which were then presented to the Building and Safety Commission’s advisory board.

“There’s not a heck of a lot we can do about it. We identified items that were not consistent with code, and those were the items that were appealed,” Usui said. “We presented the case to the Building and Safety Commission and the commission makes the determination whether it’s acceptable. They have the power to approve significant modifications.”

Which they did, in this case. While the Wilshire sign is the city’s only true video billboard, there is another billboard that comes close, which may have created the loophole that led to the Wilshire board being approved, Usui said.

“If you look at the Staples Center sign, that is also a video,” he said. “But it’s a sign that changes its copy maybe every 10 seconds or so, so it’s not distracting, and in that sense, it isn’t a motion picture, which is normally prohibited.”

The Mid-Wilshire district’s councilman, Nate Holden, said that by the time the vote came to the City Council, it was too late to vote against it.

It’s not likely that any other video signs will be going up in Los Angeles any time soon. Since the vote, Holden said he has put forward a motion to adopt new specifications for allowing this sort of video sign.

“If my motion comes out, you won’t see any more of these signs until we approve the specs,” he said.