Fight Over L.A. Live Ads Headed to City Council

Eric, I think you (or maybe Alossi) told me once that technically such a ban has no effect on the LA Live complex?

Anyway, anti-billboard activists are entering Downtown territory, a place that has been unwelcoming at night for decades.

Sounds like Trutanich is kicking some ass. He should throw the whole city council and the mayor in jail. Read the LA Weekly story about giving millions of dollars to Anschultz and LA Live when it should've gone to local communitieis, especially those in south central.

Uh, why is Mr. Trutanich so adamant? Jail time seems extraordinarily excessive. Is he suggesting criminal conduct? Please elaborate.

"especially those in south central."

For what?

It's been tough enough trying to revive downtown even after hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and over 50 years of effort have been directed at it. What makes you think that pouring money into the even more blighted, crime-filled areas several miles to the south will have their intended effect? Attempts to improve communities like that through the years often end up being a no-win situation, where the city is damned if it does, damned if it doesn't.

As for the Regal Cinema building, it's so dorky looking that it needs large billboards to draw people's attention away from its really cheesy architecture. That and the fact the Regal is going to need lots of publicity to convince people that downtown isn't a wasteland for movie going, which it has been ever since the movie palaces on Broadway started to decline beginning around the 1950s.

If Carmen Trutanich wants to spend his time fighting the negative trends that are causing the meltdown of LA, he should start worrying about other things that make it score low on the quality-of-life index.

The real question is why is Jan Perry so involved in this? What's her connection to AEG, the company that poured dollars into her election campaign and also owns the Regency? It's no coincidence that it was Perry who allowed LAPD to spend millions on security at the AEG owned Staples Center for the Michael Jackson memorial, while AEG sold the rights to the event to Sony for $60M. There's a lot of questions that need to be answered when it comes to Jan Perry and her connections to AEG. I hope Trutanich sends his file over to the feds. I'm sick of these bought and paid for politicians, and if Trutanich told her she's going to jail, I hope he also told her that she'll get no favors from anyone and she'll go down hard. It's great to see a City Attorney doing the job he was elected to do.

"The L.A. Times reported last night that Trutanich has threatened jail time for city building officials and Councilwoman Jan Perry if the signs went up."

He MUST be joking. Los Angeles deserves better than this. What a few months on the job and he's got a dictator complex?!?!?

"The real question is why is Jan Perry so involved in this?"

Maybe she's just ashamed of the laughable shape that the center of Los Angeles has been in for decades? Embarrassed by the city's low standing among cities throughout the nation due largely to LA's longtime reputation as a place with a mostly lifeless, rundown downtown. A city notorious for becoming hollowed out due to years of suburbanization, perhaps more than any other town outside of the Midwestern Rustbelt.

But if you insist on questioning the motives of people like Jan Perry, can I imply that you're visiting this blog because you want Eric Richardson to pay you for the hits you give to his site? That you'll ask for X number of dollars in return for the favor of upping his visitor count?

Trutanich is one hell of a guy spending his worrying about billboards and medicinal marijuana.

I didn't realize things in LA were looking up! Issues like violent crime, gang activity, homelessness, and the like must be on a severe decline if "Nuch" is spending his time worrying about such trivial matters.

Jan Perry is shady is hell, but that shouldn't be news to anyone that follows LA politics. Nuch is probably making empty threats so he get a piece of the action...

I wish I weren't so damn cynical.

Always follow the money...who, what when and where.

AEG seems to be big & rich enough to get whatever they want..whoever can afford the best attorney usually wins.

Terry,

I'm not sure if you live in South Central, but I work with people in the inner city and there are many programs (anti-gang, drug rehabilitation, community development, etc) that directly impact and empower neighborhoods rather than giving them an 8 dollar/hr job at some stupid cinema in our strip-mall LA Live. Or at least they could create something with more character and distribute the incentives instead of giving so much to one company whose suggestion of creating an interesting experience probably is to launch a Bed, Bath and Beyond.

The people in underserved areas need help creating jobs and businesses directly in their areas, not at Staples. The politicians in this city come crying for additional taxes for housing for the needy and police and fire services and then end up spending that revenue in tax breaks to create luxury condos. It's ridiculous for them to use these scare tactics for additional funds and then blow it on this yuppie crap.

Trutanich is kicking ass and taking names . . . just as he was elected to do. He ran (in part) on this corrupt billboards issue and got great support for it. He is doing his job - it has become such a rarity to aggressively represent the citizens' interest that people don't know how to react !

The billboards are a visual blight, quality of life issue for obvious reasons as well as in other respects. And the billboards are the most obvious daily symbol we have of the public helplessness in the fact of the pay-to-play corruption and hollowing out of our political and civic life.

Finally, for those who think -billboards- will activite and give life to communities, that's just flat wrong. And depressingly unimaginative and defeatist.

Hell, do ya see ANY billboards in those downtrodden, dull cities of Santa Monica or Beverly Hills? (Nope, they're illegal there.)

There is absolutely no reason not to allow signage at this theater. The whole thing has already been built and is ready for operation. This entire discussion thread has a bunch of morons who are saying that "oh, this money should have been used for this or that, oh, Jan Perry is a crooked politician, we're spending our money on all the wrong things...etc, etc, etc." Let's stick to the issue at hand people. I hate it when people use a simple issue and extrapolate it to their own better than thou issues. Come on, the simple fact is, this entire project was approved long ago, and now that it's built they're saying a movie theater can't have signange? Now that is really stupid. The renderings, approval, et al have been around for years. But instead, we have to use this issue for a "grander" purpose...so that we can all get on our soapbox and spout how bad politicians are, how AEG is evil, and how a theater doesn't help those in South Central. Again, come on people. You're smarter than this.

I like this dawg.

"The people in underserved areas need help creating jobs and businesses directly in their areas, not at Staples."

But the "war on poverty" ideas and policies, which started to become very fashionable in the 1960s, have been a part of the agenda of most cities throughout this country for decades. In all that time, areas like south Los Angeles and Skid Row have not only not gotten better, they've wobbled between being as depressed (with persistently high unemployment rates) and dangerous as ever to even more depressed and dangerous. Perhaps at best, they've on occasion become only slightly less broken down and crime-ridden.

The only meaningful examples of where some of those areas have managed to keep from sinking even further down is when gentrification has kicked in. But much of that has occurred in spite of the influence of local government. Moreover, various people in those long-depressed areas then start to complain about new money and the people and businesses associated with that money moving into their neighborhoods.

So damned if you do, damned if you don't.

And if you think LA is giving too many subsidies to those who don't need it, take a look at what New York City has been doing for at least 20 or more years. They've been giving huge tax breaks to major corporations to prevent them from moving to New Jersey or suburban New York or other parts of the country. By contrast, the pols at LA City Hall have been waving bye-bye to businesses as they've moved their offices to Burbank, Glendale, San Francisco or Texas.

While I don't think that big tax breaks necessarily have helped (or hurt) the economy of a city like New York, or that LA would necessarily be doing much better if it had followed a similar formula, the fact remains that Los Angeles right now has one of the highest unemployment rates of any major city in America.

"The billboards are a visual blight"

It would be nice if LA were already so free of blight that the signage on, for example, the Regal theaters was something people should get all worked up about. But in a city plagued with tons of graffiti, millions of rundown properties, millions of creaky old power poles, and hundreds of old steel-framed, erector-set type of billboards, it should be so lucky if the signs attached to the walls of a new building at LA Live were a major visual gash.

Are the people running this city insane?

Why is it that New York would REQUIRE that ALL development in Times Square include supergraphics and in Downtown Los Angeles around LA Live (modeled after Times Square, and Picadilly for Christ's sake) that it would actually against the law?

New York makes huge amounts of money from supergraphics in Times Square and uses that money for the betterment of the city. I thought that's what they would be doing here also?!

Trutanich and others like him are idiots. The city could be reaping huge profits from supergraphics and using that money to combat homelessness, create parks, or whatever we need.

Bassakwards.

But somehow charging us $3 an hour for curb parking is somehow tolerated although the people don't want that either. Hmmmm.

I completely agree with Diggity Dawg.

This is the kind of thing that drives away business from the City. Having one guy threaten to send other city officials to jail just for wanting to issue permits for an approved project is so frustrating. AEG did everything they were supposed to with this project -- they met with community organizations and worked out a deal that they ALL were happy with so the project could move forward, they followed all of City's regulations, got all of the necessary approvals, all of which cost them big money yet still they are stuck with dealing with a City that can't get out of its on way.

This just sends a message to everyone else to not do business in the City of Los Angeles because you never know who is going to get elected and decide to go after your project for some stupid reason.

Finally, Nuch himself has called AEG a "good citizen". So cut out this talk of AEG being evil. Your own champion doesn't even think that's the case.

The Building Department needs to do their job and issue the permits rather than ducking behind their Attorney. Time to hire a General Manager who will stand up to the politicians.

The real visual blight began with LA Live in the first place, somewhere I went once and never plan to return but I'm glad it gives people who like corporate America a reason to investigate big scary downtown - within the confines of a bloated mini-mall.

Movie posters and supergraphics are merely gilding a diseased lily.

Thank God AEG built LA Live. Yes, it is far from the place we all would like to love, but it will have 1000 hotel rooms which has solidified a lot of conventions which would have skipped over LA. This was a parking lot. It also stimulated construction of other restaurants and bars such as Rivera, Bottle Rock, Corkbar as well as Nokia, Club Nokia, the Conga Room, a bowling alley, the Grammy Museum and finally a movie house Downtown. Retail will be built on Figueroa and another Hotel will be built across Olympic. LA Live is only the beginning and it will be successful long term. I prefer the Historic Core but it is hard to argue the fact that LA Live is ulitimately good for Downtown and Los Angeles in general.

This isn't just about LA Live, its the fact that billboard interests (and the entertainment industry, which pays for most of the ads) have completely taken over L.A. Almost every neighborhood I go through has many more billboards, large and small, than it used to. I've yet to see any of these neighborhoods benefit from the increase. Just the opposite, as it artificially keeps commercial real estate prices high, because prices now include the billboards, whether the buyer wants them or not. (I don't, they're the sign of run down neighborhoods, which is why Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, etc. don't have them.)

You'd also think that with digital billboards, you could replace six billboards with just one, so you have the benefits without the visual blight. Has anyone seen any large billboards removed in their neighborhood? Maybe a few token or "underwater" (i.e. money losing) ones, at best.

Trut. promised fed up voters that he would be an enforcer, and he's keeping his promise. Perhaps with LA Live he wants to "make a statement". Perhaps, they're just first in line. Either way, he's a true breath of fresh air, and a hero to many of us. He made a promise to voters, and he's keeping it. Three cheers!

I convinced some friends from Silverlake to go to the ESPN Zone with me for a Dodgers game a couple of weeks ago. Aside from the fact that we were 3 of about 10 people there...for a Dodgers game, my friends said the whole complex looked like a fake light show that offends the senses...but I'm sure those mega-signs will be the key to success. On a positive note, I took them over to the Historic District after and all was well.

(I don't, they're the sign of run down neighborhoods

No, they're not. The Sunset Strip is famous for its billboards and that street looks a lot more interesting than a variety of other streets throughout LA that have few to no signs.

The major indications of a rundown neighborhood are...rundown houses and buildings. In fact, since rundown areas tend to have less economic vitality and mostly lower income people, advertisers aren't as interested in shelling out their bucks in such communities to promote their goods or services.

The stereotype that billboards in general depresses property values is ludicrous and is a sign of how little some people know about Real Estate Industry. Do you realize that before Times Square had most of it's current jumbotrons and supergraphics, it was a run-down crime-ridden area, and now it's land value is through the roof.

I'm really getting sick and tired of these anti-billboard activists and their obtuse ideology that they are a "blight" to public spaces. No, they are a blight when they are in areas where they shouldn't be.

While I will say they should be limited to only 2 areas (Hollywood Blvd and South Park), that doesn't mean they should be banned completely. It is as radical as Zev Yaroslavsky's subway ban back in the 90's, and like it, it must be prevented from happening.

I am delighted sense has prevailed. To have denied AEG - who are investing $2.6 billion in LA, these previously agreed permits would have been ludicrous. Hopefully this unanimous council decision to honour their original agreements will send a clear message to Trutanich; - that the people of Los Angeles are not only tired of the endless grandstanding of highly paid public officials, but that we are also thinking long-term. We want investment in our city. In case, anyone hadn't notice, we are in the middle of a global recession. So here's a question: A $ 2.6 billion investment over a few billboards that had already been pre-approved? Hard math? Not really. As a taxpaying citizen, I take extreme umbrage at the decidedly cheap comment of a man who thinks that the excessive numbers and 'overkill' policing that City Hall and the LAPD themselves decided was appropriate for Michael's memorial - 'wasted a lot of dough.' And Trutanich's claim that this dispute was merely about the 'legality of current billboard ordinance' - is laughable. Hopefully this City Council's decision is a reminder that the old truism: -you can only fool some of the people some of the time; is a sign of things to come.