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Saturday, January 19, 2008
Ind. Decisions - "Billboards will be history" - agreement filed Friday in Superior Court
See this ILB entry from May 3, 2006 on the denial of the petition for rehearing in Metropolitan Development Commission of Marion Co. v. Pinnacle Media, LLC for background. Here is a long list of all ILB entries referencing Pinnacle Media.
Today Jeff Swiatek of the Indianapolis Star reports on the front-page of the business section:
Ten in-your-face interstate billboards in Indianapolis that were subjects of an 8-year-old lawsuit over their legality finally will be torn down.And the city itself may end up doing the honors because the billboard company that erected the signs has gone out of business.
"Those signs are going to come down very shortly," Chris Cotterill, the city's corporate counsel, said Friday.
An agreement between the city and billboard owner Pinnacle Media, filed Friday in the environmental division of Marion Superior Court, gives the city the right to remove the large, free-standing signs, which sit on steel poles with the girth of century oaks.
The city sought the right to remove the signs on its own because Pinnacle hadn't done it, despite being ordered by the court last fall to remove them, Cotterill said.
Pinnacle did remove the advertising displayed on the signs. The signs went blank in late November, said Pinnacle's attorney, Alan S. Townsend. But he said Pinnacle doesn't have the money to take down the huge signs. Each costs an estimated $10,000 to tear down, Cotterill said. * * *
The agreement gives the city the right to bill Pinnacle for the cost of tearing down the signs. But Pinnacle doesn't have the money to pay for the tear-down, so "we're working with the city . . . to find a buyer for the signs" that will be allowed to keep the signs if it removes them, Townsend said.
Cotterill said, "We're looking to find a no-cost option to remove them . . . so the taxpayer doesn't have to pay $1." He said Mayor Greg Ballard, who took office this month, ordered the city's legal staff to push Pinnacle to remove the billboards. "He took a keen interest in this," Cotterill said.
Pinnacle's battle with the city galvanized some Indiana business leaders to side with the billboard company. Pinnacle charged that the city retroactively passed zoning that banned the billboards, after Pinnacle already had received approval from the Indiana Department of Transportation to erect the signs on public rights-of-way that weren't zoned. They were erected along I-69 and I-465 and the inner legs of the city's interstate web.
The city contended it could still order that the billboards be taken down because they hadn't actually been erected at the time the ban was passed.
After two lower courts ruled in Pinnacle's favor, the state Supreme Court in 2005 ruled that Pinnacle shouldn't have been allowed to erect the billboards because the city zoning rule was passed in time to stop them.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on January 19, 2008 07:39 AM
Posted to Ind. Sup.Ct. Decisions