Ad Creep
February 1st, 2010
As we have seen, allowing politicians to adjudicate on new billboard applications can be, well, problematic. That’s why City Council is setting up a new citizen-led Sign Variance Committee to make sound decisions based on planning principles rather than personal preferences (or lobbying, or campaign contributions, or any of the other complicating factors of politics).
On Thursday night, City staff held a voluntary information session for potential applicants, helpfully clarifying a lot of the details that aren’t fully explained online. Two dozen people came out (including me), which would have been more encouraging if all but one hadn’t been men (including me).
Applications are due at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 11, so there’s still time to get your name in. Committee members will get $250 per meeting attended, and it’s expected that the committee will meet monthly, so if you’re an urban policy wonk (and, for goodness sake, why are you reading this if you’re not?), it should sound like a pretty sweet gig. Read on for details.
December 17th, 2009
This is the second retrospective look at how the new billboard tax and sign by-law were recently won by the Beautiful City Alliance. For some context on my role, see the first post.
Artists and public space activists might have put many years worth of work into the new billboard tax and signs by-law but it was the advocates for girls hockey that saved our hide.
Heading into the first leg of the billboard debate at City Hall on December 1, Beautiful City thought we had our vote count nailed down tightly. Then Councillor Norm Kelly threw a wrench in our plans.
Kelly, chair of the Planning and Growth Management Committee (PGM), moved a lengthy motion that would have permitted about 1,000 video billboards, allowed billboards five times closer to intersections than proposed by staff (and 12 times closer than was allowed in some parts of the city) and cut the tax rates by 40%. Using an incorrect interpretation of Solomon to suggest that ‘cutting the baby in half’ was the responsible thing for Council to do, Kelly sold his package of cuts and regulatory rollbacks as a “compromise” between the needs of the outdoor advertising industry and residents.
December 8th, 2009
Having worked with the Beautiful City alliance to win the billboard tax and signs by-law [PDF] that was adopted by City Council yesterday, I’ve got a few stories from that experience that I want to share with Spacing readers in the coming days.
To contextualize my vantage point in this process, I worked to bridge the interests of the artists and public space activists within the Beautiful City alliance, which included a variety of arts and public space advocates, as well as allies in the community and small business sectors (including Spacing). I also steered communication and the political-level work. My efforts would have meant nothing without the capability of the arts community to mobilize thousands of people and the public space activists’ capacity to understand and manipulate the sign-related legal framework the City operates within. Though I suppose it’s easy to say now, even if the vote hadn’t gone our way yesterday, I would have been much better off for having had the opportunity to work with so many talented and passionate activists.
Going through the campaign chronologically is probably best left to Devon Ostrom’s inevitable doctoral thesis (disclaimer: some history is necessary for this article) so I wanted to start with something a bit more topical given today’s coverage of yesterday’s decision: the issues surrounding arts funding.
The arts funding component of the Beautiful City campaign, while consistently popular [PDF] in the public opinion polls we commissioned, took a bit of a beating on the blogs and was used as a wedge by a few city councillors (the same few that don’t see the merit in arts funding generally). Though you can be sure that Beautiful City will assert its voice during the operating budget process when it kicks off early next year, I’m not going to make the pitch here for the money; you can see that in the background information provided at BeautifulCity.ca. Instead, I’ll tell the story of why and how the arts piece made it into the recommendations City staff made to Council and what was in fact recommended to Council, what Council’s decision means and where it leaves the arts funding issue going forward.
December 7th, 2009
“It’s David and Goliath, not Solomon,” observed Councillor Joe Mihevc.
“The lobbying has been transparent,” said Mayor Miller. “You can’t hide Chris Korwin-Kusczynski! He’s right over there!”
In every deputation I gave on the new Sign Bylaw and Tax, I made sure to mention how wonderful it was to be speaking in favour of something for once, rather than against it. Public space advocates are used to having to schlep to City Hall to counter billboard lobbyists’ latest attempts to ingratiate their clients into the fabric of this city; so when City staff put forward a brilliantly positive new initiative to control that industry in a fair, thoughtful, and substantial way, it’s cause for celebration. Similarly, I am not used to writing things along the lines of: Uh… we won. City Council voted to uphold all of staff’s recommendations and then some.
December 4th, 2009
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJO65JaQQkg[/youtube]
A typical intersection in Los Angeles.
If Councillor Norm Kelly gets his way, every single billboard in this city will be allowed to turn into an electronic sign. Why? Because “Guess what, we live in an electronic age!” Seriously. That’s his argument.
Under the pretext of “modernization,” Los Angeles City Council ignorantly made a similar decision in 2006, as chronicled in this nightmarish L.A. Weekly feature from just over a year ago. One L.A. councilman told the paper, “obviously many of us regret it.” Another said, “When we discussed digital, I don’t think anyone had a clear idea of what it was about. It was new to me…I don’t know if any of us saw how bright they would be. It’s a whole new world.”
But you don’t have to look to Los Angeles. You can always just read this letter from a poor sucker who has the misfortune to live within a mile of the illegal CBS video screen on top of the Amsterdam Brewery at the foot of Bathurst.
And allowing third-party signs to display “electronic static copy” isn’t even the only one of Kelly’s motions that would transform the new Bylaw into an ironic mockery of its original intent.
December 1st, 2009
Chief Building Official V. Ann Borooah presenting the City staff report on the Billboard Tax this morning.
Two hundred. Thirty-seven. Eight million. Six thousand forty-six.
I just made these numbers up. Pulled them out of the air. They represent nothing. Or maybe there’s a very particular system I used to arrive at and generate each, but I won’t tell you what that is.
The billboard industry does the same thing, except they commission expensive reports based on such numbers [PDF]. The Out-of-Home Marketing Association of Canada — composed of heavyweights Pattison, CBS, Astral, and Titan, as well as a handful of smaller companies — is hilarious. Here’s the standard exchange their representatives have with Councillor Adam Vaughan and just about anyone else with the ability to think critically:
OMAC: “The proposed tax on billboards represents an unfairly large portion of our revenue.”
Vaughan: “Can we see your revenue numbers so that we can figure out what an appropriate tax rate would be?”
OMAC: “No.”
Vaughan: “Well, will you disclose those numbers to an independent third party who will keep them confidential?”
OMAC: “No. But we have this other aggregate number that we can give you instead.”
Vaughan: “Can we see how you got that number?”
OMAC: “No. We’re telling you. That is the number.”
And on and on and again and again. For about five hours, the most recent time. They’re shocked that anyone wouldn’t take them at their word.
IllegalSigns.ca has been debunking OMAC’s claims all year. So have the sharper councillors. And now thankfully City staff have joined the chorus.
November 30th, 2009
Lobbyists. In the lobby. Ahead of the November 4 Planning and Growth Management Committee meeting at which the Billboard By-law and Tax were debated.
Lobbying, as a profession and an industry, is an endlessly fascinating thing. Although I tend to think of lobbyists as mercenary influencers, one I know likes to joke that they’re simply “activists with better shoes” (and indeed her footwear is considerably nicer than my own).
I used to be afraid of them. Well, afraid of writing about them. Knowing that they resent the recent regulation of their industry and would just love for community activists such as myself to become subject to the same rules, I generally tried to avoid provoking them too much.
But then I finally realized that lobbyists gain their power from being able to operate quietly — the Registry, which lets anyone track their movements, is something of which they are understandably not fond. Like a good PR firm, lobbyists are most effective when they are invisible to the public, and so nothing causes them to bristle so much as being called out.
Here then is a guide to some of the more notable City Hall lobbyists shaking hands on behalf of the outdoor advertising industry these days:
November 26th, 2009
On January 9, 2009, City Councillor Karen Stintz had a business lunch with Les Abro, president and CEO of billboard company Abcon Media. They went to The Abbot, a pub on Yonge Street north of Lawrence. Stintz had a shepherd’s pie, a soda water, and a tea; Abro had a burger, a cranberry juice, and also a tea. We know this because Stintz submitted the receipt to have her meal reimbursed by the City [PDF, 3rd page]. (Two glasses of Ironstone wine were additionally ordered at $11 each, but neither was billed to Stintz’s expense account.)
Four days later, Abro submitted a permit application to build a massive new roof sign at 3442 Yonge — in Stintz’s ward, two blocks north of The Abbot. And on the Reimbursement of Business Meals form, Stintz (or her assistant) noted that the meeting was with regard to the upcoming sign bylaw (”re: Sign by-law”).
Les Abro, however, was not registered as a lobbyist, and so on May 26, I submitted a formal complaint to the Lobbyist Registrar. On June 9, the complaint was officially rejected because the meeting “did not constitute lobbying” and the “Lobbying By-law therefore would not apply.”
So when is lobbying not lobbying? When the parties involved say it isn’t.
October 19th, 2009
On Friday, I noticed that the sidewalks around the Yonge-Queen intersection have been painted with stenciled ad messages promoting the Toronto Maple Leafs.
This is certainly not the first time we have seen …
October 15th, 2009
Photo by torontocitylife.
Transit shelters require concrete pads (bases) underneath them. Astral pays for those. The garbage bins they’ve designed also need concrete pads, when they’re not being installed directly onto a standard sidewalk. Astral — as per their contract with the City — is supposed to pay for those, too. But perhaps due to the fact that a bottoming-out ad market has harmed the profitability of the overall deal, they’ve taken an attitude of “yeah…. no.”
Just so there’s no doubt, here’s what the contract [PDF] says:
4.13 The Company agrees, where required by the General Manager [of Transportation Services] and subject to obtaining all necessary Permits, to install and maintain, at its sole expense, concrete pads satisfactory to the General Manager when required and in accordance with the specifications attached as Schedule “A” to this Agreement as a base for Elements installed under this Agreement and to apply for all necessary Permits required to do so.
(Schedule A is the first appendix to the contract and contains the diagrams and specifications for all the street furniture elements; Astral has fought against public disclosure of this and other sections, and I am expecting a decision from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario by the end of the month.)
The cost of all the pads for Astral’s bins comes out to “no more than” $6 million. Yesterday, Council’s Government Management Committee adopted a report [PDF] recommending that the City settle with Astral for an undisclosed amount. The Star’s Paul Moloney discovered that this amount is $3 million.
