Decades ago, Culver City banned billboards and obnoxious animated and illuminated signs. It has also prohibited signs advertising a business anywhere except at the site of the business itself. Culver City often boasts of its “small-town character” and, while anti-urbanism can be provincial and exclusionary, our strict sign code served to equitably enhance quality of life.
However, the conservative City Council majority recently voted to repeal several core elements of this code, reversing the ban on commercial advertising city-wide. The pretext for this decision was a proposal from Orange Barrel/IKE to install video kiosks in public space.
This proposal has come before the Council and been rejected several times, but it keeps coming back at the behest of the Council’s Economic Development Subcommittee: Council Members Albert Vera Jr. and Göran Eriksson. Both these men are former officers of the Culver City Chamber of Commerce, which Orange Barrel/IKE has joined even though they have no office, staff, or other presence in Culver City. They have essentially hired the Chamber to lobby and appear to have bought the support of its members, including these Council Members. Orange Barrel/IKE has not limited its largesse to the Chamber: it was also a major sponsor of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party’s Roosevelt Awards dinner last year.
Orange Barrel/IKE has a long history of ethically dubious conduct. Appropriately, their intervention in Miami appears the shadiest.
In the first proposal submitted by Orange Barrel/IKE for Culver City only two out of the eight slides displayed by the kiosks would given to the City for public information, with the other six reserved for advertising. The proposal did not mention what share of the advertising revenue the City would receive, if any, even though the City would allow kiosks on public land and produce the content that would draw people to them. In contrast, Berkeley got 10% of the advertising revenue for the first two years and 25% every year after that. Is it possible that Council Members Vera and Eriksson, both business owners, are worse at business than those dirty hippies in Berkeley? Were they simply dazzled by a PowerPoint? Or are they acting as lobbyists for a Chamber member rather than in the best interest of the City?
An op-ed published last year in the San Diego Times documents two of the three major problems with Orange Barrel/IKE’s kiosks.
First, they are ugly. Culver City will go from banning signs with motorized parts to having eight-foot high video screens on our streets.
Second, they are unnecessary. Smart phones are utterly ubiquitous. The City could install QR codes in public spaces enabling people to access whatever useful information would be on the kiosks at little cost and with little visual disturbance.
The third problem is covered in a recent piece in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly. In short, these kiosks are surveillance devices. They have cameras which are promoted as a public photo booth but which can also photograph passersby at any time. The kiosks log MAC addresses, the unique identifying numbers of every smart phone, tablet, computer, or similar device nearby. This information is sold to marketing companies – profit for Orange Barrel/IKE which is not shared with the City, much less with the people surveilled – and it is shared with law enforcement networks, including national ones where it may be used to target undocumented people, violating the City’s Sanctuary law, or by police in Arizona, Texas, etc, who are seeking people who have come to LA for abortions or gender-affirming care. Orange Barrel/IKE salesman Chris Greene told the Berkeley City Council their kiosks could count the number of people at a protest. We know corporate privacy policies are not worth the pixels they are displayed on. The only effective privacy policy is to prevent the collection of our data in the first place.
The local proponents of the kiosks are the same elected city representatives who love to pat themselves on the back for “listening to everyone,” but who have, in this case, refused to heed the objections of residents across the political spectrum. We should be very wary about who they might be listening to and how it might benefit them personally and/or their corporate sponsors at the expense of our community.
Note that the Supreme Court has ruled that giving a public official a reward for a vote is not bribery and that, in Miami, Orange Barrel/IKE hired a former City Council Member as their primary lobbyist. People say it’s all in the game, but we don’t need to play that.
On July 8 Council Members Vera, Eriksson, and O’Brien voted to repeal the relevant parts of the sign code before a Request For Proposals for kiosks was even created. As Council Member Freddy Puza attempted to point out, this was completely unnecessary if the Council’s intention was only to start a discussion of public service kiosks. However, even if the kiosks are ultimately rejected, the conservative Council members has gifted our public space to their business cronies, who will fill it with screens, building wraps, billboards, and other eyesores. They have once again chosen profit over people.