Wow, never thought I’d write that sentence.
But Garcia picked up on a story today that I’ve been following, too, and he’s got the point basically right: A property owner whose case is coming up tomorrow before the Board of Appeals claims that Clear Channel tried to shake him down, demanding he accept a lousy contract — and when he didn’t, the company pulled a billboard off his building and made sure that he could never lease the space to anyone else.
The building owner, Cheon Hool Lee, isn’t exactly an impoverished victim; he’s a retired dentist who owns several commercial properties in the city and lives in Hillsborough. He’s a Korean immigrant who has done well in the United States, and one of the things he did was buy a piece of property on Market Street that had a billboard on top — a valuable billboard in a prime location. In legal papers, Lee and his son Tony assert that they’vbe been told similar billboards in similar places rent for $10,000 – $15,000 a month (and that’s about what I’ve seen from my experience watching the cost of political ads on billboards, too.)
Clear Channel had a lease on the billboard at 2283 Market and was paying the Lee family $697 a month.
Lee wanted more, and when the lease expired, he tried to raise Clear Channel’s rent. According to the legal briefs, Tony Lee contacted other competing billboard companies and other industry professionals who told him that comparable properties rented for “in excess of 10 to 30 times” what Clear Channel was paying.
“I spent hundreds of hours in the last few months trying to be reasonable with them,” Tony Lee told me.
And here, according to the legal filings, is what Clear Channel said: Take our deal — or you get nothing at all.
That’s because city law says that no new billboards can be constructed in San Francisco — and if an existing billboard comes down, it can’t be replaced. So Clear Channel one Sunday evening showed up with a crew and took the billboard structure on Lee’s building down. Now he gets no rent at all — and can’t replace it.
Although Lee technically owned the structure and the building it sat on, and could have rented it to a Clear Channel competitor, it’s gone now — and unless the Board of Appeals supports the Lee’s plea, it will be gone for good.
The message: Mess with mighty Clear Channel, refuse to accept our bad contract, and we’ll screw you.
There are, of course, complicated legal issues here: Who exactly has the “right” to a billboard, the building owner or the company that leases the space and resells it? Did Clear Channel have the right to put a crew on top of Lee’s building without his permission and take down a structure? Does the city’s ban on new billboards apply even when a billboard was improperly taken down?
I’m no fan of billboards, and I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not going to try to sort that all out. I’ve called Clear Channel’s lawyer, who said he can’t comment and sent me to the company’s government affairs office, where I’ve left a message and haven’t heard back. I’ll keep trying to get the company’s response and will update this post when and if I get it.
But I will say that at this point, it sure looks like one of the biggest media companies in the nation is doing something pretty damn sleazy.