Bus Stop Firm Agrees to Relocate Ads Assailed as Glorifying Taggers

SANTA ANA —  The president of a bus stop shelter firm said Tuesday he is prepared to move controversial Tag Rag clothing advertisements to new locations to satisfy county transit officials, who say the poster-size ads promote graffiti tagging.

The Orange County Transportation Authority board on Monday had threatened to relocate bus stops away from shelters that carry Tag Rag advertisements.

“We are very sensitive to the graffiti problem,” said Scott Kraft, chief executive officer of Tustin-based Metro Display Advertising Inc., the firm that puts up the shelters. “Our own costs for removing graffiti have tripled over the past three years.”

Kraft said he has already moved the ads about 40 times. “We get complaints from high schools or residents and we move them, in cooperation with the advertiser,” Kraft said.

But the head of the billboard company said his firm cannot refuse to accept advertising for the clothes without violating Tag Rag’s First Amendment rights.

“Tag Rag has been doing everything it can to help us relocate its posters to areas not affected so much by graffiti,” Kraft said.

Tag Rag officials said Monday that their clothing line neither inspires graffiti nor glorifies taggers. Clothing designer Michele Dahan has described the clothes as “the Brady Bunch meets the streets.”

Kraft said he talked briefly Tuesday morning with Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, a transportation authority board member who criticized the ads at a board session the day before. Vasquez, who also chairs the county’s anti-graffiti task force, declined Tuesday to discuss the conversation.

At Vasquez’s urging, Orange County transit officials had said they might move bus stops away from shelters that sport the ads of Tag Rag.

But Kraft said Tuesday that a bus boycott of the shelters would be pointless because the ads are aimed at street traffic, not passengers waiting to board buses.

“They misunderstand how the advertising works,” Kraft said of transportation officials. “The best thing you can do for the advertiser is not have buses stopping there, because that detracts from other people paying attention to the ads.”