Slipped a Mickey? One man's light pollution is another man's historic landmark.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

If you happen to be 5, a giant illuminated Mickey Mouse dancing on your bedroom walls would probably be the greatest thing that ever happened to you. But for a grown-up, the discovery that the billboard outside your bedroom window has been replaced by a digital LED sign flashing a rotating cast of Mickeys and Paris Hiltons bright enough to shame the sun might be a little less pleasing. The grumpy adults must have their say, and so the battle is joined in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, where one such digital billboard recently debuted.

The city tried to ban new billboards in 2002, and the lawsuits got tedious for everyone involved. So the two sides cut a deal two years ago: Clear Channel and the other billboard companies dropped their challenge to the ban in exchange for permission to upgrade existing signs. Hidden inside the deal was an important detail: These upgrades wouldn't require a zoning review.

There are about 11,000 billboards in the Los Angeles area, making it the biggest billboard media market in the country. Under the terms of the agreement, a digital billboard can only go up in place of an existing traditional billboard, which suggests that most of the neighborhoods in question aren't exactly quasi-bucolic Wisteria Lanes.

Still, the new billboards have upset a few citizens. A NIMBY phone call or two later, a small army of politicians--including those who cheerfully collaborated on the compromise two years ago--managed to slap three competing proposals on the table by October 15 to protect defenseless residents of gentrified neighborhoods. At the same time, plans to add new billboard districts in Koreatown and near the 110 Freeway continued unimpeded, as did plans to wrap the Los Angeles Convention Center in illuminated advertisements.

City Council President Eric Garcetti wants to impose a temporary moratorium on billboard upgrades, and he is pushing a plan to use loopholes in the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to force all 850 upgradable billboards to go through environmental review. The savvy Garcetti is betting that by advancing under the green flag of truce he can find a way out of the mess he and his fellow city officials created, while simultaneously sucker punching the companies they negotiated with just two years ago. It's not hard to envision the environmental review:

"Wait! These illuminated billboards consume electricity?" the board will say in mock surprise. "They...