Mural Morass
How an Industry Got Away With Breaking the Law in Miami

“That you would go to bat for the criminal element putting up these murals is stunning, even by Miami standards.” — Eston “Dusty” Melton

By Rebecca Wakefield

If I owned a piece of property that generated five figures of income a month, I would want to hold onto it — even if garnering that kind of flow would require me to break the law, pay off city officials, and blemish the landscape with cheesy ads for alcohol, cars, iPods or that boring Miami Ink show.

Ads aren’t so bad when the alternative view is Greater Miami’s vast strip mall wasteland. When I used to travel from the county line to downtown Miami every day, I would get a chuckle out of the Mr. Bidet ad painted on a building just west of I-95. When a mud-colored sound barrier was erected along sections of the highway, I lamented the loss of the visual riot. It only redirected my attention to the foibles of my fellow drivers and the utter failure of transportation planning.

Now I live in Miami Beach, where city officials are so concerned about aesthetics they even try to disguise parking garages as shrubbery. All this exposition is my way of saying that individual cities have different standards for how they want their communities to look. This is exactly the sort of thing policy-making bodies are meant to tackle. If giant billboards, whether free-standing or attached to walls, don’t offend, cool. Write the laws that way.

But something strange happens in the city of Miami. The city officially considers mega signs good only in moderation and thus limits their number, size and placement. Yet the city doesn’t really enforce its own or the county’s laws on the subject, at least not in a consistent fashion. (To be fair, yes, some of the offending signs have come down.)

Instead, it has spent years and untold sums of taxpayer dollars jerking off the handful of companies comprising the billboard industry, as city commissioners continually pretend to be shocked and dismayed. Meanwhile, these companies keep making millions of dollars every year, illegally.

Former New Times scribe Kirk Nielsen laid out the tawdry history of the city’s disingenuous relationship with the industry in a series of articles spanning four years. Here’s the short version:

In 1985, Miami passed an ordinance limiting to 10 the number of billboards allowed in the city, along I-95’s western edge. The same year, the county passed a more robust ordinance prohibiting billboards east of I-95 or within 660 feet of the highways. The county law required municipalities to enforce this law.

What with riots, cocaine cowboys, real estate bubble bursts and spiking poverty levels, billboards weren’t among the notable problems in the Magic City for a good decade. Then around 1996, billboard companies started buying up property and putting up signs, even though the city had declared in 1990 that illegal billboards had to go.

Things clicked along until 2000, when Eston “Dusty” Melton, a lobbyist (and former Herald reporter) who had helped push through the 1985 ordinances, began to point out that the industry was taking unfair advantage of the city. (Ironically, Melton once represented billboard companies.) The city reluctantly began to attempt actual code enforcement of the scofflaws, but was largely ineffective for various reasons that boil down to money and politics. A city commission-appointed advisory board, created to evaluate the outdoor adscape, was mostly stacked with either the executives of billboard companies or the lobbyists working for them. Predictably, the board suggested the city relax its billboard regulations, to essentially legalize the illegal ones and allow more and larger signs to proliferate.

In 2003, the city settled with one of the worst offenders, Carter Outdoor. The company agreed to pay $350,000, but got to keep its 10 illegal signs along the highway and promise to take down two more in about 20 years or pay a pittance fine. In 2004, the city’s crack legal team let Clear Channel keep nearly half of its 450 signs in exchange for cash and free advertising for the city.

During this same period, big signs hung on the sides of buildings started multiplying downtown. About a year ago, there were 21 wall signs in the neighborhoods between the Design District and Brickell.

Mayor Manny Diaz and his staff addressed the new problem by calling the companies in and asking them to contribute to the political action committee pushing the county’s campaign to pass a massive bond issue for museums, parks, public health, affordable housing, a chicken in every pot, etc… (OK, maybe they weren’t serious about the housing part). Two of the companies threw in 10 grand apiece.

Not long after, City Manager Joe Arriola put together an ordinance legalizing the euphemistically named wall murals, which are illegal, if they paid $10,000 to the city’s Arts and Entertainment Council. It didn’t make it to the City Commission because County Manager George Burgess wrote a letter gently reminding him that such an ordinance would violate the county's signage law.

Last year, the city decided to let nine property owners with illegal murals keep them up, in exchange for a $250 daily fine. The math on the various murals works out to $67,500 a month, but is peanuts in this lucrative industry. And that is assuming they bother to pay. City records show that not all of the companies are keeping up with the payment schedule. Wallscape Media, LLC, for instance, hadn’t paid its bill for December, January or February, as of the first week of March.

Earlier this month, the City Commission voted to ask the county to let wall murals exist legally in parts of downtown Miami. This was too much for Melton, who went down to City Hall last week, armed with a few dozen large photos of the illegal signs and uncharacteristically strong language for the commission. “That you would go to bat for the criminal element putting up these murals is stunning, even by Miami standards,” he ranted. “The inescapable conclusion I’ve come to is that by sharing these profits, the city has become business partners with [these] nine properties. The city is profiteering.”

His point, even if you don’t care about billboards, is that it is wrong to reward people who break the law without ever really addressing the illegal behavior, or the reason the law was made in the first place. Would the city consider letting all the little cafeterias it shut down for allowing prostitution and/or gambling just pay a fine?

Herald columnist Ana Menendez did a nice job of contrasting the city’s lackadaisical response to mural violators to its heavy-handed approach to petty code violations by homeowners. At the same meeting she attended, Commissioner Johnny Winton also made a salient point about the fact that the Herald hasn’t wasted any ink on its own interests in this matter, since wall murals frequently hang from its hulking edifice on Biscayne Bay. “I haven’t seen any writings in the Miami Herald about their own illegal advertising on their building,” he said.

Sweet Jesus, I love this town.

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.