Metro beer and wine ad proposal falls flat

The beer that made Milwaukee famous won’t be riding L.A. public transportation any time soon.

After a discussion liberally spiked with references to Schlitz—and even, briefly, to Blatz—a Metropolitan Transportation Authority committee voted unanimously today to reject a proposal that would have allowed beer and wine ads on the agency’s buses and trains.

Metro’s communications staff told the committee that accepting beer and wine ads could yield $500,000 a year for the agency in a 50-50 split with its advertising vendor, CBS Outdoor.

A number of big city transit agencies, including New York’s MTA, permit such advertising, but Metro would have been the first to do so in California—a distinction none of the committee members seemed eager to claim.

“For the amount of money you’re talking about, for us to be the first in California to advertise alcoholic beverages on our buses rubs me the wrong way,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a Metro director and member of its Executive Management and Audit Committee.

Yaroslavsky also questioned whether the revenue split was in the agency’s best interests.

Another member of the committee, Richard Katz, said he shared those concerns and suggested there were better ways to bridge a $181 million deficit in the coming fiscal year.

“I’d much rather explore naming rights at station locations and things like that to generate revenue before I’d put alcohol on buses,” Katz said.

“Schlitz station?” Yaroslavsky quipped.

“That would be the old abandoned station, yeah, that would be the Schlitz station,” Katz parried back.

Committee chair Ara Najarian said he had “personal objections to alcohol advertising.”

“I think much of it nationally is targeted to minority groups,” he said. “I think it encourages a behavior that is not productive, during certain hours of the day at least. And I don’t think we can regulate the content.”

“If we said we would permit Schlitz to endorse a message such as ‘Drink responsibly, let Metro be your designated driver,’ we can’t restrict to that,” Najarian said.

Metro adopted its policy banning alcohol and tobacco ads in 1997, at the behest of then-Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who said it was a matter of good public health policy. Subway riders interviewed this week seemed split on whether it was appropriate to make an exception for beer and wine ads. (See our earlier story here.)

But among the Metro committee members, the feeling was unanimous: current policy should stand.

It seemed for a moment that the committee’s vice-chair, Supervisor Don Knabe, would have the last word on the matter:

“A half a million bucks is not worth the heartache, trust me,” Knabe said.

Then Yaroslavsky offered this: “Can we get some money from Schlitz, just for having brought their name up?”

Posted 3/18/10