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Billboard Baggin’s
Somewhere, Dave Meslin is weeping with joy. Today marks the launch of Rami Tabello’s IllegalSigns.ca: an incredibly ambitious project that, through its comprehensive analysis of billboard advertising in Toronto, ties together a number of the loose ends of the broader public space movement. What Tabello has found – and has the hard evidence to back up – is that “half the billboards in Toronto are illegal.” They have “thus far identified 350 illegal billboards,” and estimate that “there are an additional 1500 illegal billboards in this town that we have not yet discovered.”
Providing the details for 283 of those illegal signs, he seems to have finally proven that which public space advocates have long suspected: that outdoor advertisers in Toronto have for years consistently operated outside of the law, with the permission of the City of Toronto’s Municipal Licensing and Standards Division. Since amalgamation, MLS has “improperly determined that hundreds of illegal signs are legal because MLS’s officers haven’t a clue how to investigate billboards.” Billboard companies also frequently take advantage of the City’s disorganization by “filing false information with the Buildings Department to obtain permits without the required City Council approvals. Widespread permit fraud has resulted in the issuance of around 100 illegal permits for billboards.”
Driving home this notion of Toronto as the wild west of billboards are Tabello’s Street Studies, in which he walks us along a stretch of Toronto, giving us a tour of the illegal signs on the route. As he elaborates on the unlawfulness of one familiar billboard after another, it becomes clear that whatever mechanisms the City has in place to enforce its own by-laws have failed terribly. Equally astonishing is his Google-powered Illegal Signs Map (a snapshot of which appears above) on which you can click a location to get more information about the illegal sign there, leaving no doubt that the problem is very much a systemic one that, in theory, can’t be tackled by a single person. But Tabello knows how to slice his way through the bureaucracy at City Hall better than anyone, and it shows.
Getting the relevant City documents for even a single sign is often a tedious and frustrating process (even for city councillors), and so it is somewhat of a comfort to learn that City Hall is taking notice of Tabello’s spectacular work and that his persistence is leading to some immediate, tangible change: “Over the past two months, the City of Toronto ordered the removal of about 200 illegal billboards pursuant to our research and complaints.” But, he adds, “Very few have come down.”
When the City orders the removal of an illegal sign, an advertising company has fourteen days to do so. As Tabello has put it, this “allows advertising companies to operate illegal signs for 14 days at any location whatsoever, then re-erect the signs after they have been removed to comply with a 14 day order.” The relevant by-law used to include a provision that allowed the City to remove illegal signs immediately, but this was changed to the current system upon the recommendation of then-Commissioner of Planning and Development Bob Millward, who is now both an independent “consultant” for advertising companies seeking variances at City Council and the project director of the City’s advertiser-driven “Coordinated Street Furniture Program.”
IllegalSigns.ca is only half the fight, however, as preventing inappropriate new billboards from going up is just as important as taking down illegal ones that have already been erected. Possibly the most consistently successful advocacy campaign of the Toronto Public Space Committee, the Billboard Battalion is a small army of volunteers who, through simply submitting written deputations and emails to councillors, have managed to turn around the unfortunate situation in which Community Councils simply rubber-stamped advertisers’ requests for variances. A variance is an exemption from a by-law which is supposed to be used to obtain special permission for something which adheres to the intent, if not the letter, of the law; they are too often, however, used as loopholes to disregard a law entirely despite the fact that it may fully apply. Staff frequently recommends refusals of variance requests for billboards, but before the Billboard Battalion came along, Community Councils (made up of the councillors who represent a particular quadrant of the city) would oddly ignore staff’s recommendations three quarters of the time. (This is a good time to direct you to the ever-valuable resource that is VoteToronto’s archive of campaign donation records.) Since the inception of the Billboard Battalion in July of 2005, the Toronto and East York Community Council has agreed with staff recommendations for refusal 81% of the time, and dozens of billboards, many of which had been illegally erected prior to a request for a variance, have been defeated. Anyone can sign up for the Battalion’s monthly calls to action.
Obviously, the fact that it is falling to the citizens of Toronto to confront individual manifestations of what is clearly an institutional issue is something that must be rectified. In July of last year, City Council requested that
the City Planner and Executive Director, City Planning, in consultation with the Executive Director, Municipal Licensing and Standards and the Chief Building Official, report to the Planning and Transportation Committee on the establishment of a Task Force to deal with the issue of third party signs, with representation from these three divisions, and interested City Councillors, with a view to establishing a system that would provide:
(a) for a renewal process;
(b) a more efficient application process;
(c) better controls on new technology, sign placement, and size;
(d) a better mechanism for compliance and enforcement measures;
(e) a new revenue stream for the City through application and renewal processes; and
(f) a legal process needed to allow the City to impose heavy fines on the companies whose products or services are advertised on illegal signs.
If (and only if) done properly, a system that included (a), (b), (c), (d), and (f) would be fantastic; part (e), however, is extremely problematic, as it would mean that no billboard application would ever be turned down by this Council, lest they decline money that could be used to “buy a lot of soccer balls,” as Councillor Glenn “if there’s one thing I love more than toilets, it’s advertising” De Baeremaeker has put it.
Now that the City of Toronto’s “Tri-Departmental Task Force on Illegal Signs” is up and running (Tabello claims that the illegality of most of the signs on his map have been verified by them), both IllegalSigns.ca and the Toronto Public Space Committee are going to cling on to them and not let got until advertisers are held to the same law-abiding standards as everyone else in Toronto, even if they just want to tell the nice people about yogourt.
Illegal Signs Map and photo of Titan Outdoor’s six illegal signs at 1 Bloor Street West from IllegalSigns.ca. Graphic of the defeated billboard at 1 Richmond Street West from the Toronto Public Space Committee’s Billboard Battalion.