In 1992 Pinellas County government, at the urging of the public and with the assistance of the Pinellas County Council of Mayors, approved a new county sign code that would bring down many of the towering billboards lining local roads.

The new code gave billboard owners until 1999 -- a legal, seven-year amortization period -- to recover their investment and take down the billboards.

Today, three years past that deadline, billboards still stand all over unincorporated Pinellas. And on Tuesday, the Pinellas County Commission is scheduled to consider not only allowing those billboards to remain up for many, many more years, but also permitting the construction of new billboards alongside other roads.

Let there be no confusion about what the County Commission is preparing to do Tuesday: It is preparing to capitulate to the billboard companies and their threats.

When the amortization period ended and Pinellas County began to enforce the billboard ban, two of the three major billboard companies sued the county. The third company threatened to sue. They made it clear that if the county pursued enforcement, they would tie up the code in court for years and cost the county hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. This is something the billboard industry excels at doing.

County commissioners, already facing a tight budget, decided to try a compromise. They created a team made up of an outside attorney with special expertise on billboard issues, a representative of the county attorney's office, and Commissioner Susan Latvala to negotiate a settlement that would keep the county out of court.

Two of those proposed settlements are up for votes before the County Commission Tuesday. Latvala has been waving the pompoms over the proposed settlements, calling them "a huge win" and "clean and sweet." That's not what we would call them. Here's what they would do:

One of the companies, the Lamar Co., could keep most of its billboards up until 2014, three until 2025. The other company, Viacom Outdoor, would gradually remove its billboards until 2021, except for three on Ulmerton Road that could remain until 2025.

For every two billboards the companies removed, they would get a county permit to erect one new billboard on a Pinellas interstate or on so-called federal aid primary roads: U.S. 19; Ulmerton Road east of U.S. 19; a short stretch of Roosevelt Boulevard; State Road 580 east of U.S. 19 to SR 584; Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard in Clearwater east of U.S. 19, and Gandy Boulevard east of U.S. 19. Billboards on such highways enjoy federal protection, so if Pinellas County one day wanted the boards down, it would face huge cash payments for them.

On those roads, the county would change its distance requirements for billboards, so that billboards could be closer together and closer to residential areas.

If a billboard marked for removal by the county settlement was annexed into a city, that would count as a removal, even though the billboard might not come down.

This is no win for Pinellas County. It is a shameful surrender to a bullying industry. Furthermore, it is a betrayal of the residents and public officials who worked hard 10 years ago to create a code that would improve the appearance of Pinellas County. Pinellas should send its negotiating team back to the table or start enforcing the code immediately.

Residents who care about existing billboard blight and don't want new billboards constructed on the county's major roadways need to call, e-mail or fax county commissioners before Tuesday. Two recent public hearings on the proposed settlements were poorly attended, leaving some commissioners to believe that cleaning up billboards is no longer a public priority.

Battling the billboard industry will be expensive and it may take years. But other communities have fought the battle and won. Pinellas can,too.

* * *

While the fax machine is warmed up, be sure to fire off a missive to state legislators, who once again, in what has become an annual outrage, opened the back door and allowed the billboard industry to slip in with proposed legislation that would not serve the public interest.

An amendment to an otherwise innocuous transportation bill in the House (HB 715) would require local governments to pay "just compensation" -- that means cash -- to billboard owners in order to remove their signs. Amortization, which has long been used by communities and has been recognized by the courts as a fair, legal method of providing payback to sign owners, would no longer be possible if this bill became law. And since most local governments could not afford the cash payments, the billboard industry would have won de facto protection for all of its signs on all highways in the state.

This legislation would yank from local communities the right to reduce the proliferation of billboards and thus improve the visual environment along their highways. The presumptuous legislators who allowed this bill to get to the House floor ought to be slammed for it.

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