Proposition D: A Catastrophe for San Francisco

Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos.
Photo by Luke Thomas

By Art Agnos, former Mayor of San Francisco

October 29, 2009

Proposition D on this Tuesday’s ballot would force a new electronic billboard zone on both sides of mid-Market Street between 5th and 7th streets. The last thing San Francisco needs is a Las Vegas style strip mall of high definition electronic billboards controlled by a group of building owners. Indeed, San Francisco voters banned these things with 77 percent of the vote in 2002.

Whenever our city has endeavored to make changes to make San Francisco better and more livable, we’ve made certain that the public could see what the change would look like.

We did it 20 years ago with public hearings and elaborate drawings of a new Embarcadero boulevard to replace a demolished freeway.

We did it 10 years ago with drawing and videos of an Octavia Boulevard to replace the Central freeway.

We have always done it with from new ballparks, libraries, housing developments, and shopping centers, to new markets like Trader Joes and Whole Foods.

Not so with Prop D.

Nothing.

No drawings of electronic bill boards. No pictures of 500 square-foot high definition signs side by side that includes wind signs, balloons, ribbons, streamers and signage similar to and including “dancing inflatable men.”

No kidding…that last one is straight from the Director of SF Planning Department’s analysis.

Prop D’s language says the billboard can be “flashing, blinking or rotating” with no limit as long as none of them are larger than 500 square-feet. The one limit is that the signs cannot rotate or spin faster than once every four seconds.

But they can be located 25 feet above the roof of any building along the 2 blocks. Those kinds of billboards were banned 45-years ago. But the new ones will get the entire city’s attention from their living rooms, or bedrooms, in a ring that encompasses Twin Peaks, Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Potrero Hill and Bernal.

There have been no public hearings, plans, drawings or renderings of the proposed billboards because those images won’t sell to voters. Instead, they promise donations to unspecified arts or vague youth programs of their choice.

Some argue this is the price we have to pay during hard economic times to generate more money for youth, arts, and culture. We will never know because only the property owners along these two blocks will make the decisions about who will receive any share of the huge income from these digital signs.

Don’t be fooled San Francisco! This is a blatant privately sponsored initiative to bamboozle voters into creating an unlimited electronic billboard lane down two blocks of Market Street under the guise of civic improvement. In the billboard business they call it “signage destination.”

That’s right, unlimited numbers of electronic billboards… because it is up to them – not us – to implement the development of the billboards. The City and public would have no control under this new law.

Not the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, the Planning Department, the Building Inspection Department, or the Arts Commission. In short, no city body will have any authority to implement this new law.

“They” will decide. “They” are a group of building owners on the two blocks of Market Street who will control, manage, and benefit from the unlimited number of new roof top and street level electronic billboards they will own outright.

“They” are known as the Mid Market Community Benefit District (CBD) that started only in 2006 and their public record is pretty short. According to available online public IRS reports, “they” received $790, 411 from government grants. And “they” spent $165,792 for the year of 2007. None of it was for identifiable services in the neighborhood. That left $624,619 still not spent for any beautification.

Now “they” want to generate millions in billboard revenue for building owners to do some more of the same. Currently, a single printed sign on a Market street kiosk sells for $210,000 a month! It doesn’t take much imagination to estimate what an entire electronic “flashing, blinking, or rotating 500 square-foot bill board will bring in a month for the commercial building owners.

Don’t take this former mayor’s word for it. Read what the City Planning Director wrote to the Director of Elections: “Such unprecedented delegation of power to a private entity may create the risk of legal liability for the city… because of the new powers assigned to the CBD, concerns regarding the CBD’s membership, decision making process, and accountability are apparent.”

The Director’s letter also warns that Prop D gives these commercial building owners authority and approval over the messages and content aimed at the public: “The proposed Ordinance appears to regulate content in new general advertising signs. Such regulation may be considered an unconstitutional restriction on speech and could put the City at risk of legal liability.”

There is no question that the mid-Market area needs a makeover. Mayor Newsom has several initiatives in progress to do just that in this area that needs it. But Prop D would be a catastrophe not only for those two blocks, but the entire city. The notion of beautifying Market Street by adding dozens of electronic billboards is like building a double-decker Embarcadero freeway to beautify the waterfront of San Francisco.

FCJ Editor

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