Editorial | Illegal Billboards
Now you see them...
Across Philadelphia, neighborhoods will be the better for the city's new pact with the billboard industry to remove hundreds of illegal signs from the sides of buildings.
For nearly 20 years, sign companies contributed to urban blight by erecting these unsightly - and illegal - billboards. As a further burden to communities, the 6-by-12-foot billboards, known as "eight-sheets," typically carried racy pitches for booze and tobacco.
The signs are coming down, at last. An agreement this week between the Street administration and major sign companies will mean the removal of 900 eight-sheets, as well as require industry to inventory and verify the legality of every remaining billboard.
As Mary Tracy at the nonprofit Society Created to Reduce Urban Blight (SCRUB) noted, the illegal signs "are a terrible blight." Like towing abandoned cars, pulling down the eight-sheets should improve both the look and feel of neighborhoods.
The settlement pledges Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. to foot the estimated $350,000 bill to remove the signs over six months, even though the billboards are owned by another company, PNE Media L.L.C., of Union, N.J.
In stepping up, though, Clear Channel and other sign companies came away with a fat prize: the city's agreement to slash billboard licensing fees. With this, Tracy's fear is that the city "gave the farm away."
Her valid concern is that the new agreement could create loopholes for illegal signs, inasmuch as it relies on sign firms to certify to the city that standing signs are legal.
The city's top lawyer, Romulo L. Diaz Jr., insists the billboard agreement won't grandfather illegal signs. The billboard companies' inventory will be made public - available for SCRUB and others to check - and Diaz pledges that city officials will go after illegal signs.
If past performance is any guide, though, City Hall won't fill the fierce watchdog role needed to target the many full-size billboards that likely are illegal. And industry? As a group, its sorry record is well-established.
One potential backstop: PennDOT, which is drawing up its own inventory of city billboards at the request of federal highway officials concerned over violations of federal billboard rules. That list is due to be made public within six months, says PennDOT's Rina Cutler, and it should be used as a yardstick against the industry-provided inventory.
Good riddance to the eight-sheets. That's real progress. But it's far too early to conclude that the plague of illegal billboards in Philadelphia has been resolved once and for all.