The file expired quietly: twelve years of Los Angeles failing to rewrite its own sign code

There is a stretch of almost any older commercial boulevard in this city where you can stand on the sidewalk and count four separate eras of sign law on one block, and the pleasant part of that (pleasant if you like this sort of thing, and I do) is that none of the older eras were ever repealed. They simply accumulated. A pole sign from before 1986 that nobody can produce a permit for and that is lawful anyway, a billboard face that went digital and then went dark and came back as painted panels, a storefront sized under a formula the city has been trying to replace since 2008. Nobody designed that block. The city litigated it, settled it, had the settlement voided in court, and then spent twelve years failing to write the rule that would have sorted the whole thing out.

The thing about a sign code is that it is the most nakedly aesthetic document a city produces, which is why reading one properly tells you what the place believes about itself, and Los Angeles is unusual mainly because its code records two decades of the city being unable to agree with itself. All of it is public. All of it is dated. And all of it is still standing on the block.

The 2002 ban did more than stop new billboards

In April 2002 the City Council amended the municipal code to ban new off-site signs citywide (Ordinance No. 174547, Section 2.11), which on its own would be an ordinary piece of outdoor-advertising politics, the kind of thing a dozen cities did that decade. The clause that actually mattered came immediately after it, because the ban was written to reach "alterations or enlargements of legally existing off-site signs" as well, and that sentence is the hinge for everything that follows. It means the 2002 ban was never only about erecting new billboards, it was about touching the ones already standing, which is precisely the question of whether an existing structure may become a digital display later on. A great many people in this trade read that ordinance as a construction ban and moved on. It was a modification ban, and the distance between those two readings is the next twenty years of litigation.

The settlement the city signed against its own ordinance

On September 30, 2006 the City settled with Clear Channel Outdoor and CBS Outdoor, and the terms obliged the City to issue permits letting those two companies "modernize" up to 840 of their post-1986 signs, a quantity the Court of Appeal later described as one quarter of their combined inventory. The settlement reached considerably further than that number suggests, because it also recognized the legality of all of the companies' pre-1986 structures regardless of whether they had ever been lawfully permitted, and allowed 200 additional faces on structures already standing. It is worth being precise about the 840, since the figure circulates in a form that is simply wrong: it is a ceiling on modernizations, and the settlement defined modernization to include tri-vision, back-lit thirty sheets and the addition of a face, not digital conversion alone. Writing that the settlement "turned 840 billboards digital" gets the number and the category wrong in one stroke, which is a fair summary of how this whole subject is usually reported.

Summit Media sued, and in Summit Media LLC v. City of Los Angeles (2012) 211 Cal.App.4th 921, decided December 10, 2012, the Court of Appeal held the settlement void because it contradicted the ordinance the city itself had passed four years earlier, ordering every digital conversion permit issued under it invalidated. Clear Channel had converted more than 80 faces by that point and CBS had 13, and in compliance with the trial court's April 2013 order the displays were switched off and the signs went dark. They were not torn down, which is the detail most retellings get wrong and the one a sign company would care about. Outfront obtained permits to alter 11 of its 13 signs back to legal nonconforming use, and Clear Channel took out 81 permits to strip the dead digital faces and hang conventional frame panels in their place. Summit Media asked the court for demolition and did not get it. The structures are all still up there, holding paper.

Passed over the objection of the city's own planning director

The citywide ban on new off-site digital displays and supergraphic signs is Ordinance No. 180841, passed on August 7, 2009 and effective the following week, and the year is worth fixing in your mind because it is routinely reported as 2010. Worth noting too is who objected to it, since the ordinance carries a formal disapproval from the Director of Planning under Charter Section 559, which is to say the city's own planning chief put in writing that the Council should not adopt the thing the Council then adopted. A council may overrule its planning director and occasionally ought to. It is simply useful, the next time somebody tells you that a sign code represents the considered judgment of the planners, to know that this particular one went through over the written objection of the person whose judgment that was.

Twelve years, five drafts, and a file that expired

Council File 11-1705 was the attempt to resolve all of this in a single rewrite, and its history explains a good deal about how people in this trade talk about the code. The City Planning Commission adopted a version in October 2015 and the Council produced a competing version of its own. On February 25, 2021 the Planning Commission disapproved the Council's version outright and went back to recommending its 2015 draft, transmitting that recommendation in May 2021, where it was referred to the Planning and Land Use Management committee on the twenty-seventh of that month. PLUM never acted on it. The file expired on May 25, 2023, twelve years after it opened, and nobody ever voted it down.

This is also where the widely quoted "nine to one" comes from, and it wants handling carefully, because I have watched it get attached to the wrong thing more than once. The nine is real enough: the text requires that at least nine square feet of legally existing off-site sign area come down for every one square foot relocated. But it is a stated minimum rather than a rough figure, it governs relocation agreements on private property inside a Tier 3 sign district rather than conversions at large, and it can be bought down as low as two to one through in-lieu public benefit payments. It also is not in the ordinance the Planning Commission actually recommended, since the commission disapproved relocation agreements in concept and the phrase does not appear anywhere in that draft. The number everybody repeats therefore belongs to a version the city's own planning body rejected, sitting inside a file that has since expired, which makes it less a rule than a fossil of a proposal.

The one thing the code never asks

Here is what strikes me, having read a fair amount of this. Every layer of it concerns permission: who may erect, who may modify, who may relocate, at what ratio, in which district, under whose grandfathering. Not one line of it concerns whether a person can read the sign.

The trade has an actual answer to that question and it is not a matter of taste, which is what makes the omission interesting rather than merely sloppy. The federal standard sets one inch of capital letter height against thirty feet of legibility distance (MUTCD, 11th Edition, Section 2A.08), and the sign industry's own research body uses that same index of thirty for a sign you approach perpendicular. Then it drops the index to ten for a wall sign read at an angle from a moving car, which is to say the identical message on a storefront needs letters three times taller than it would on a blade sign. Their field research found drivers missed thirty percent of parallel wall signs while actively looking for them. A sixteen-inch letter reads at roughly four hundred feet head-on and closer to a hundred and sixty from the road, and no ordinance in this city holds an opinion about that. A code that rations square footage while saying nothing about stroke width or viewing angle is regulating the quantity of sign rather than the reading of it, which tells you what the twenty-year fight was actually about.

Stand back on that boulevard one more time. The pre-1986 pole sign nobody has papers for, the billboard that was digital for four years and is holding paper now, the storefront sized by a formula the city tried and failed to replace for twelve years. Every one of them is a permission decision with a date attached, and the block is the sediment those decisions left behind. The city will get to the rewrite eventually, and when it does, the argument will be about square feet again.

Related: the other end of Los Angeles sign law is the neon the city will protect but will not pay to keep lit. PermitFeed reads the filings for commercial sign companies.