How Prop. D billboard plan was defeated

Q.&A. with MILO HANKE, San Francisco Beautiful
 
Last week’s electoral defeat of the Market Street billboard plan, Proposition D, was such a close one because proponents hid the details of who would handle the funds coming from large, flashing ads in a “trust me” contract, said the opposition’s key organizer.
 
Milo Hanke is president of San Francisco Beautiful, one of the leading nonprofits that spearheaded the No on Prop. D campaign. He said that the continued pressure on the city for more public advertisements is an asymmetrical battle, and that the biggest threat to the public is both the deliberate ambiguity and lack of clear intentions by the measures promoting corporate access to outdoor spaces.
 
The measure would have allowed giant, flashing and even rotating billboards on Market Street between Fifth and Seventh streets. Forty percent of the income would have gone to fund community arts programs. Proponents said the plan was an effort to jump-start economic revitalization in a stretch of the city’s spine plagued by blighted buildings and low rents.
 
The measure was opposed in the Nov. 3 election by 54 percent of the voters, a result that surprised activists on both sides.
 
Mid-Market is in desperate need of a revival, Hanke said. But, he warned, “any solution that involves billboards is dead on arrival.” This is the fourth out of four times that San Franciscans have said “no” to proposals for new advertisements that have been “bundled” with community issues in an attempt to lure votes.
 
While he doesn’t begrudge landowners for wanting to make money, or politicians for wanting to fund education and the arts, Hanke said the measure was a façade in more ways than one.  The measure, as it was presented to the public, with revenues going toward cultural and arts education for city youth, was a typical, recurrent scheme from the advertising industry meant to obscure the real effects of covering mid-Market with billboards.
 
Ultimately, groups like San Francisco Beautiful are determined to give the public what it wants, but what the public wants and what it thinks it wants didn’t quite match up during the Prop. D campaign, Hanke said.
 
“Our proponents outspent us at least 15 to 1. Our campaign has spent somewhere around $30,000 to $35,000, and the proponents have spent, we estimate somewhere between $500,000 to $600,000.”
 
It wasn’t until the past two months that he and Tom Radulovich, executive director of the nonprofit Liveable City and a BART board member, started to tell voters what Prop. D was going to entail “under the hood.” When it started to penetrate public awareness that the “Yes” on Prop. D campaign was spending so liberally to get the measure passed, some proponents started to question their endorsement.
 
“I won’t name names,” Hanke said, “but two of those people who endorsed are embarrassed for endorsing Prop. D.”
 
Hanke’s principal objection to the regulation of billboards and distribution of revenue to arts program was that it was to be handled by the privately run Central Market Community Benefit District. He said that the claim that new billboard would bring the right kind of attention to San Francisco was a “trust me” move, because no one could anticipate tourists’ reactions or the windfall from fees paid to the arts programs.
 
If not Prop. D, then what is the answer to fixing Market Street?
 
“We will work with our elected officials,” said Hanke, who predicted that solutions for Mid-Market would become part of the next mayor’s race. “We’ve seen this happen with other development issues … that have made their way into the citywide dialogue. There is no reason for us as San Franciscans to look the other way any longer because we can’t. They“ — the advertising industry — “are in our face.”  
 
 On the low turnout and close numbers:
“This is a David-and-Goliath story. We won in getting out the vote, getting out the message, piercing through some of the questionable assertions of the proponents of Proposition D. We were out there, really, in any kind of strength really over the past two months.
 
On inattentive endorsements:
“The other part of their [proponents of Prop. D] campaign is that they lined up a lot of endorsements. We think they were inattentive endorsements.
 
“In fact the majority of the board of Supervisors and the mayor endorsed Prop. D. Everyone agrees that mid-Market needs help. It’s almost a political scandal that it’s gone decades without any resolution to the problems that have long plagued that area. We are not going to let our politicians gloss over these problems with cheap, easy, ugly solutions.”
 
On the desperation of the state of Market street:
“We think that D in Proposition D might as well stand for ‘desperation.’ The way we ultimately prevailed was that we brought attention to the dubious enforcement of the safeguards and the enforcements of the purported community benefits. San Franciscans know, too, that putting up massive blinking-around-the-clock billboards is just not what this town is about.”
 
 On campaign strategies:
“Some people are familiar with this arcade game called ‘Wack-a-Mole.’ The billboard industry is always coming back and finding new ways of insinuating itself into the fabric of the community. The way they win standing in a community is to bundle — to bundle it with an altruistic purpose, to bundle it with a community purpose, as was attempted here — and defeated, fortunately, on mid-Market.
 
On safety:
“The U.S. Department of Transportation is just getting on to this under the general topic of “driver distraction.” They are including the existing reviews on digital billboards and the effects that they have had on driver distraction. So before we have a body count we have to stop what common sense tells us is an immediate hazard to pedestrian safety.”
 
On civic pride:
“Talking to Parisians, they get animated when you say “San Francisco.” This city is a world-class city, with symbolic and practical significance. We had an advertising scheme on the Golden Gate Bridge that SFB stopped. Because they are always needing additional revenues for public transit, they thought maybe we should sell bragging rights to the corporations that they’re subsidizing costs to our municipal asset. It really hurts our sense of civic pride that we would go down that path.”
 
On the diversity of support:
“We had the League of Young Voters, the League of Conservation voters. It really cuts across all age groups, the historic aversion to billboards in SF.
 
“We didn’t expect to get the endorsement of the Chronicle, but we sat down with the editorial board. When they looked at how flimsy this legislation was, they said it’s a ‘trust me’ contract. It matters very much what is in writing.”
 
On future enforcement:
“Going forward, we know that the billboard industry still has designs on further insinuating itself into San Francisco, and we will be here to fight them at every turn. Half the billboards in this city operate illegally and it’s been that way for decades. And it’s going to stop.”

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