A proposed settlement between the Pinellas County Commission and Clear Channel would permit the company to erect bigger, taller and flashier billboards than the ones that currently pollute our county roadways.

They've got to be kidding.

Pinellas County officials and a billboard company propose to settle a lawsuit that was filed after a new county sign code outlawed the company's billboards in 1999.

The proposed settlement would allow Clear Channel Outdoor Inc. to leave up many of its illegal billboards for almost 40 years.

Forty.

Years.

These are billboards that are still up four years after they became illegal. The county, wanting to end the blight of big signs on local roadways for safety and aesthetic reasons, approved a new sign code in 1992. The code required business signs to be smaller and shorter and banned billboards in most of the unincorporated area. It gave sign owners seven years to recover their investment and remove the signs.

Most businesses complied by March 1999, but not the billboard companies. They refused to take down their signs and sued the county. Pinellas County commissioners decided to settle and formed a negotiating team made up of Commissioner Susan Latvala, two county attorneys and an outside private attorney. Last summer, the commission approved settlements with two companies that are small players in the county, giving them until 2025 to take down all of their billboards. Those settlements were bad enough.

But those terms were tough compared with those negotiated with Clear Channel, formerly Eller Media, which has most of the county's billboards. Just how horrible is this proposed settlement?

For every two billboards Clear Channel takes down, it will earn the right to put up a new billboard on an interstate, U.S. 19 or other federal aid primary road in the county. Those relocated billboards will not have to come down until 2042.

The new billboards can be 25 feet taller than now permitted -- 50 feet tall -- with bigger sign faces and closer together than current law allows. Wooden billboards can be converted to steel monopole structures, thereby extending their life.

Billboards annexed into a city don't have to come down.

Sixteen billboards erected on public land in St. Petersburg will not be torn down immediately, as they should be because they are trespassing, but can remain a year.

Clear Channel will get vested rights to its billboards, including the right to repair the billboards, replace them and convert them to changeable electronic signs. The agreement ensures that these billboards will remain on the county's roads for two more generations, even if county residents don't want them.

Unbelievably, several county commissioners seem poised to approve this document at their meeting in Clearwater Tuesday afternoon because they say it is "the best deal" they can get. The 1992 sign code appears to be legal and enforceable, and the county already has won some preliminary skirmishes in court, but commissioners say they don't want to spend more money pursuing Clear Channel in court. They also say billboard control is no longer a priority of Pinellas residents who pushed for tougher sign laws in the 1980s and early '90s.

Residents who care about improving the county's visual environment need to speak up now. So should the law-abiding sign owners who complied with the new code in 1999 and every business or resident routinely required to obey county ordinances.

County commissioners make laws and it is their duty to enforce them, even on an industry that shamelessly bullies the public to promote its own interests.

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