vic.gedris.org Never mind the blogs, here's the website.

This is exciting stuff:

Meanwhile, LA Weekly has published a pretty scary article about the digital billboard situation in Los Angeles.

A public meeting was held in St. Catharines on Monday to consider tough new restrictions on billboards.

We previously look at an illegal St. Catharines Pattison billboard: In St. Catharines, Inspector Mychaskiw Catches Grant Sign Service Red Handed.

The proposed new signs by-law would only permit billboards on vacant lots. When the property is re-developed the sign would have to be removed. There would be a 300 metre separation distance between billboards and a 100 metre separation from residential zones.

A lot of the hard work in obtaining the tough new restrictions was done by a group called Scenic St. Catharines. The Standard wrote this article on the issue yesterday.

The staff report is available starting on page 3 of this PDF. City Staff rejected proposals to license sign companies saying “City staff are not aware of any other municipality who requires licensing of sign companies.” That may change soon as staff in Toronto will be reporting on sign company licensing.

IllegalSigns.ca is currently researching possible illegal billboard locations in St. Catharines where we believe that Pattison is sometimes operating two signs where they have a permit for one sign, and where separation requirements may have been violated in a few cases. Stay tuned.

Megaposter is small enough that it can’t afford the lawyers to fight the City, but it’s not quite legit yet.

Viktor Lang still has a few illegal billboards.

For example, he is still operating an illegal sign on the Lush property at Queen and Soho, although a somewhat less egregious one than the one in this photo. Regarding Lush, Lang recently applied for a permit to paint a mural sign at this location, but that permit application was rejected because the building was recently listed historic on account of the Queen Street West Heritage Conservation District.

Had Viktor Lang applied to paint a mural on the Lush property a year ago, before the QSWHCD was approved, when he first received a Notice of Violation for his sign, he would have obtained the mural permit.

Meanwhile, further down the street, Viktor Lang appears to have a mural permit he’s not entitled to, but one that we can’t do anything about. This is Megaposter’s new painted sign on the Rex Hotel:

We reported the removal of this illegal window-obstructing fascia in Rex Hotel Sign Down:

The sign replaced this illegal fascia that was obstructing windows:

Queen Street West is one of the few locations where painting a mural makes economic sense, so we would expect all the fascia signs on mural permits along this strip to revert to painted signs once the law is enforced. Problem is, we believe that the mural permit issued to the Rex Hotel ought to have been revoked due to non-construction for the same reason the permits for 341 Bloor Street West were revoked. The permit for the Rex was issued to Murad Communications in 1997. Unfortunately, building inspectors are often sloppy and will classify permits as “inspected and cleared” rather than having to go through the process of revoking them when fascia signs are built in lieu of murals. It’s a problematic situation which will result in about 4 murals in downtown Toronto that wouldn’t be there if the inspector was on his toes.

In Spiral Beach Caught In Erich Genseberger’s EcoMedia Shakedown Scheme we told you about how the billboard company that is responsible for maintaining Toronto’s garbage bins is issuing legally-questionable invoices to bill posters.

Well it turns out that EcoMedia is issuing similar invoices to the City of Toronto per this Staff Report:

See, when it snows in Toronto, the City sends out crews to move the snow from the streets to the sidewalks. Genseberger’s garbage bins are so shoddily built that maybe, just maybe some of the bins were damaged in the snow removal process. But probably not. Probably Genseberger is making the whole thing up because when the City went to verify the supposed damages they encountered stark differences between what Genseberger claims and what the City’s investigators found on the street:

By the end of the summer, it became apparent that a gap persisted between what EcoMedia’s damage claim alleged and what staff felt responsible for as a result of snow removal efforts conducted either by City crews or by City contractors… Negotiations have resulted in a proposed settlement with EcoMedia to avoid further potential costs associated with additional staff investigations, further meetings and any subsequent legal process.

The City also noted that many of the garbage bins are “missing leg bolts and some door latches were not working properly,” but the City Solicitor is not requiring EcoMedia to live up to the specifications in the contract, which requires EcoMedia to keep the bins in good working order.

The City’s Works Committee adopted the confidential settlement negotiated between EcoMedia and the City Solicitor last night, after a deputation from the Toronto Public Space Committee’s Jonathan Goldsbie couldn’t stop them.

In January of this year, Justice Douglas Gray of the Ontario Superior Court struck down the Town of Oakville’s signs by-law on the grounds that it did not comply with the Charter of Rights. As a remedy, the court also ordered the Town to immediately issue 21 billboard permits to Larry Vann’s Vann Media, a company that specializes in advertising on Pizza Boxes.

Yesterday, in a unanimous decision, that remedy was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal which called it inappropriate. Oakville was, however, ordered to re-write parts of its by-law but was given directions which indicate that, under the weird way that law and economics collide, Oakville could write a by-law which would amount to a de-facto ban on new billboards in reality, but not on paper. We would expect Vann to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court of Canada. An appeal by Oakville is less likely, but may come if Vann appeals.

We previously covered this issue in:

Complete Liveblog of Vann Media vs Town of Oakville at the Ontario Court of Appeal Yesterday

Vann Media is Thoroughly Out-Factumed by the Town of Oakville’s Diligent Bay Street Litigators

Larry Vann Tries to Pull a Fast One on Oakville, and the Ontario Court of Appeal Shuts Him Down

Town of Oakville Appeals Ontario Superior Court Decision to Quash Signs By-Law

We’re pretty happy with the decision from the court mainly because Grey’s decision to order Oakville to issue the 21 billboard permits contrary to Oakville’s by-law created new common law, along the lines of American jurisprudence. This decision reverses that and makes it easier for Toronto to move forward with signs by-law enforcement - it also makes it more difficult for our City Solicitor to justify her habit of entering into undisclosed “understandings” with billboards companies, for which she never informs City Council. Not that we think she’ll stop doing that.

Here is the decision:

The key part of the decision is paragraph 53. In this paragraph the court lists the sections of the by-law that have to be re-written then, quite remarkably, gives suggestions as to how they could be made constitutional. Here are the suggested re-writes:

· Rather than allowing only one sign per property, be it a first party sign or otherwise, the Town could allow more than one sign for a property with a very large frontage.

· The town could continue to ban billboards in commercial and residential zones, but allow third party signs in “non-prestige” industrial zones located outside of the “E2″ zones.

· Rather than limiting billboards to vacant lots, billboards could be allowed on very large properties where there is a large portion consisting of open space.

· Rather than ban billboards along all the roads listed in Section 39(5)(b), signs could be permitted near some of those roads.

Were the town to carefully follow these suggestion, we don’t think Vann Media would build any signs in Oakville because the size of sign is still limited to 80 square feet and a critical mass of 80 square foot signs is required to make the economics work in a small place like industrial Oakville. You can, however, make tons of money on 10′x20’s in Oakville. We warn the Town of Oakville that we expect Larry Vann to eventually apply for permits for a number of 80 sqf. signs in the most obnoxious possible locations then parlay those permits into variances for standard 10′X20. Oakville’s new by-law needs to account for exactly that strategy.

In terms of precedent for Toronto, we feel that because Oakville has only one legally existing billboard, and because Toronto has thousands, and because Toronto’s new billboard by-law is unlikely to come anywhere near as strict as the suggested re-writes in this decision, this court decision has limited impact for Toronto. The key victory from Toronto’s perspective is the quashing of the 21 permits.

We shall see what happens next.

In April 1994, City Council adopted Chapter 297 of the Toronto Municipal Code, otherwise known as the Signs By-Law. Section 10 D of the by-law regulates fascia signs and states that:

In the case of a sign used for the purposes of third-party advertising, the sign is not permitted on a building wall that faces a street or on a building historically listed by Council or designated under the Ontario Heritage Act;

The above sign is located at 1274 Queen Street West and Noble Street in the western fringes of Parkdale. In November 1995, Pattison Outdoor applied for and obtained a permit to build this sign. The approved permit documents and the photo above clearly show that the sign faces a street, Noble Street:

The sign was inspected by the building inspector in June 1998. The inspector didn’t know that third-party fascia signs aren’t supposed to face a street. He improperly cleared the file, and the illegal sign has been there ever since.

We have asked for the revocation of this permit.

Six months ago, the City’s Licensing and Standards Committee considered a massive report on illegal billboards.

We had some serious concerns about the report. In short, City Staff were asked to report on their actions for each and every sign that IllegalSigns.ca filed a complaint against. For example, we discovered that the public reporting in the staff reports was inconsistent with information contained in internal City spreadsheets.

We submitted this written deputation to the Licensing and Standards Committee regarding our concerns about the first sign report. City Council then ordered staff to report on the concerns expressed in that deputation. City Staff’s entire response is contained in this sentence:

With regard to the comments made by Mr. Rami Tabello in his letter dated April 8, 2008 to the Licensing and Standards Committee, every effort has been made to address his concerns about incomplete reporting. The charts include accurate and factual information about the status of each specific investigation.

Our main concern that that City Staff continue to list complaints as “Active Investigation” when the investigations have been dormant for over 18 months. In addition, City Staff are not reporting on the meetings they have conducted with Pattison Outdoor, Titan Outdoor, StreetLife Media, and Strategic Media, nor are they reporting on the agreements they have reached with Strategic and Titan with respect to the City Solicitor’s decision to allow those companies to maintain their illegal billboards. In addition, a significant number of our complaints are not being reported on (and were probably lost). Here is the main Staff Report [PDF]:

Here are the reports for the districts on a sign by sign basis:

• South District Buildings Investigations
• South District MLS Investigation
• North District Buildings Investigations
• North District MLS Investigation
• West District Buildings Investigations
• West District MLS Investigation

In a few instances, staff have reported that complaints are invalid when in fact they are indeed valid. We will be bringing those to the attention of the Licensing and Standards Committee on a case by case basis. On the bright side, most of the times where staff are reporting that a complaint is invalid, we made a mistake - which means that we understand their thought processes.

Welcome back to Back-Ups where we examine the issue of billboards that obtained permits for a single face, only to have second face illegally installed on the backside of the sign.

Oftentimes when an billboard company has a single-sided sign they will apply for and obtain a permit to double-side the sign. In many cases, when the original single-sided sign was built a double-sided sign at that location may not have been economical to operate, but due to demographic changes and population growth a double-sided sign became desirable.

When the companies can’t obtain a permit to back-up the sign, they do it anyway.

Today we look at Astral Media’s roof sign at 1140 Dupont Street:

We suspected this sign was a back-up without having to file a freedom of information inquiry to look at the permit. We became suspicious of this billboard because the numberplates do not match. Astral Media’s numberplates are sequential, but on this sign the westerly face, the one with more visibility, is numbered 111:

The easterly face of the sign is numbered 366:

If the easterly face of the sign was built at the same time as the westerly face of the sign, the easterly would have been numbered either 110 or 112.

We later filed an FOI and examined a copy of the (microfilmed) permitted plan, which confirmed our suspicions that the sign was backed up.

The reason Astral Media couldn’t obtain a permit to back the sign up is because in July 1995, after conducting a study of the proliferation of roof signs along Dupont Street, the City of Toronto enacted an amendment to the signs by-law concerning Dupont . That amendment increased the setback from a residential zone to a roof sign enough to make Astral’s billboard non-conforming.

This was Megaposter.ca’s sign at 117 Peter Street:

We previously looked at the sign in Audit: 117 Peter Street where we showed you that MLS officer Danny Baird determined that the sign was legal in March 2006.

After our complaint charges were laid. For over a year Megaposter.ca removed the sign face without removing the framework:

Just last week the framework was finally removed:

We hate to see shoddy workmanship. When the workers removed the nameplate they didn’t have the right tools:

Typical.

Meanwhile, we at IllegalSigns.ca are considering starting a new topic named Recession. Those of you familiar with our Building Boom topic know that condo development downtown has had a devastating effect on the billboard industry’s inventory.

Well, condo development has ground to a halt in the City of Toronto as the recession has set in. The recession has a similar effect on the billboard industry - the vacancy period for billboards increases in a recession as companies can’t sell the space. According to our sources, the industry has already seen a sharp slowdown in sales and we expect it to continue.

When it comes to an illegal sign for which enforcement has commenced, it is difficult to tell whether the sign is vacant because of enforcement or because of lack of sales. In the case of 375 Queen Street West (at Peter Street), we think it’s because of lack of sales, as Astral is maintaining all of their fascia signs on mural permits:

Note closely, and you will see that the parking lot next door is slated for development. It remains to be see whether that lot will be developed.

The latest news from the City:

A special meeting of Planning and Growth Management has been called in order to receive the Phase 1 Report of the Toronto Sign By-law Project. Members of the public and industry are invited to provide feedback and make deputations.

Meeting Details:
Monday, December 8th
9:30am to 12:00pm
Committee Room 1
Toronto City Hall, 100 Queen Street West

We wrote about Los Angeles in Corrupt City Officials, Greed, Lies, Stupidity, Incredible Ineptitude, Secrecy, Laziness, and a City Strangled by 4000 Illegal Billboards.

The public space forces in LA have taken to the streets. Here is a remarkable TV news report:

We love it when this happens:

In today’s edition of Before and After, we look at the sign that Astral Media removed from 276 King Street West. This sign has been down for over a year and a half now. We previously looked at this sign in Astral Media: A Culture of Non-Compliance With the Law (Part One) and Astral Media: A Culture of Non-Compliance With the Law (Part Five) where we noted the re-erection of the sign.

Astral has not operated this sign since the early summer of 2007. The sign had no permit and was built on a listed historic building. This is what is looks like today:

We expect Strategic Media to re-erect this sign shortly as they have acquired the lease.

Meanwhile, across the street, at 266 King Street West, Astral Media has not operated this illegal billboard for almost two years now:

No word on the status of the lease at 266 King West. Toronto and East York Community Council rejected the variance application for 266 King West in early 2007.

The original version of this blog post stated that the draft billboard by-law would be ready for public comment in late November. This is incorrect. The late November release will not constitute a draft by-law but will be a summary of what the City has heard throughout the first round of consultations.

The draft billboard by-law will not be ready for the scheduled Planning and Growth Management Committee meeting in November. In the meantime, unlike public comments submitted with respect to the Street Furniture Project, which were declared a state secret by the City Clerk, the City has released the public comments for this project. So progress is being made. They are pretty remarkable. Here they are [PDF]:

We’ve written quite a bit about fascia signs on mural permits. In fact, the City of Toronto is now being sued by Titan Outdoor over the issue. Toronto is not the only city with a vinyl sign on a painted sign problem.

There is a lot in common between New York City and Toronto. Billboards for one.

This article from the New York Times from is from 1998:

The article illustrates that, just like in the City of Toronto, the New York Department of Buildings is issuing illegal permits for billboards:

City Councillor Duane recently wrote to the Commissioner of Buildings, Gaston Silva, saying that he fears the department ”is issuing blanket approvals for these signs without regard to building codes, zoning regulations, or their appropriateness.”

The article then goes on to say:

Billboards are permitted, with restrictions, in the parts of downtown that are zoned for manufacturing. They are banned in historic districts, though painted advertisements are allowed on some buildings. And within 100 feet of a residential zone or park, billboards are allowed only if they face at least 165 degrees away.

So the NYC code has more permissive regulations for painted advertising.

The photograph above, from IllegalBillboards.org, is of Fuel Outdoor’s illegal billboards at 64 3rd Avenue. A complaint was filed against the sign on August 14, 2006. Then in December 2007, Fuel Outdoor obtained a permit to paint a sign on this wall.

The permit appears to specify that there was an existing legal non-conforming painted sign on this wall. We would doubt that.

We’ve written about Fuel Outdoor before in Fuel Outdoor - The Dirtiest Billboard Company in America and Fuel Outdoor Builds 324 Illegal Signs in New York City Then Sues New York City.

Back to our coverage of the Dzeko Scammers. The Dzeko Scammers, as readers of this blog are aware, stole a billboard lease at 10 Wickman Road from a developer named Ravi Banwait. We provided coverage of the matter in the following blog posts:

Legal Pincers Close on Dzeko Scammers

10 Wickman Road Scammers Face Million Dollar Environmental Cleanup Bill

Dzeko Scammers File Appeal

At 10 Wickman Road, Roy Dzeko’s Men Don’t Get Away With Scamming Ravi Banwait Out of $1.3 Million.

Meanwhile, we have discovered that the real estate agent that the Scammers used, Brian Gogek, was found guilty of ethical violations in 2006 and was fined by the Real Estate Council of Ontario [PDF].

We also found an interesting document in the Appeal Court files. It’s the cross-examination of Elio Monaco. We believe that Elio Monaco lied under oath. He claims that he first thought of putting a sign at 10 Wickman Road in September 2007 because he fortuitously drove by the property while exiting IKEA. It had nothing to do with Roy Dzeko tipping him off, despite the fact that Roy Dzeko was the best man at Monaco’s wedding, despite the fact that Roy Dzeko was present at the Community Council meeting in September 2007 when the variance was granted.

Here’s the cross-examination:

Monaco also testified that he developed this illegal billboard at 165 Avenue Road:

That’s a fascia sign on a mural permit. It’s also too high and it encroaches the abutting property. The mural permit was obtained by one Roy Dzeko, Elio Monaco’s best man:

Monaco is also operating an illegal billboard at 262 Wilson Ave. with Street Life Media and at 2029 Jane Street with Pattison.

Today we continue our look at documents filed in the Titan Outdoor lawsuit. This is the affidavit filed by Stephen Moss [PDF], the Municipal Licensing and Standards officer who issued orders against most of Titan’s signs:

• Moss notes that he issued Notices of Violation to both the property owner and to Titan. He states that charges have been laid against property owners and “the only reason that I and other Municipal Standards Officers have not charged Titan as well is simply because we have not been successful in determining Titan’s correct legal name from corporate and business names searches conducted… Upon obtaining this information, charges would likely be laid against Titan as well.” Paragraph 15.
• He states that although the signs by-law permits the city to remove Titan’s illegal signs, “the City has not exercised this power in respect of the vinyl signs in issue primarily due to the legal issues in dispute in the application herein.” Paragraph 16.
• Moss disputes Titan’s suggestion that it “strives to be complaint” with the by-law. Moss notes that “my observations have often been to the contrary.” Paragraph 18.

We took a look at Patrick Little’s illegal billboard at Queen West and Strachan in What’s Patrick Little Going To Do Now? Patrick Little of Juxta Productions sold all of his illegal billboards to Titan Outdoor but kept this one at 935 Queen Street West.

For the longest time the sign was sold to Diesel Jeans:

Under enforcement, Patrick removed the advertising from the sign but maintained the structure:

Recently, the entire structure was removed. Over the past few months, Patrick sent out feelers for applying for a variance. During this process he advertised the Dundas/Shaw farmer’s market on this sign — an ad that nobody would object to. A few weeks ago that ad was removed, as was Patrick’s structure and the Juxta nameplate:

At Nuit Blanche, however, we spotted Optiadmedia projecting a Vespa commercial onto the wall (see second half of video).  The dude from Optiad assured us they had an agreement with the property owners; the proprietors of 935 Queen West, it seems, just can’t get a good night’s sleep unless they have an illegal billboard on their wall.

The report for the new, harmonized billboard by-law was to be heard by the Planning and Growth Management Committee on November 13. The City now says that “the Sign By-Law and the interim report on the Sign Study will be available for review and comment sometime in late November.”

There are no committee meetings scheduled for December or late November.

The schedule for the by-law was always optimistic. Better to do it right than quickly, we say.

Meanwhile, the City has released this synopsis of public comments made during the consultation process. Our very favourite: “All carbon neutral signs would be wicked!”