West Los Angeles -- Calling them a "visual assault" and "visual blight" on their community, 25 people canvassed City Councilman Bill Rosendahl's Westside district Saturday morning to determine how many billboards -- digital or otherwise -- have saturated the area.

Standing beneath an electronic billboard that changes messages every half minute, Rosendahl said the volunteers will present their findings to city officials at the end of the month.

"Many of us have wondered how many billboards are in the district, how many have switched to digital billboards and what is this all about," he said. "We have seen billboards pop up like mushrooms in the last few years.

"And we have seen last year turn from simple passive billboards that are nice to digital billboards that brighten up the sky. There'll be 10 to 15 different messages flashing in your face."

Barbara Broide, a member of the Coalition to End Billboard Blight, said there are now 110 billboards on commercial streets in Rosendahl's council district, which stretches from Mulholland Highway on the north, to Imperial Highway on the south, including approximately 270,000 people from communities that Brentwood and the Pacific Palisades, Westchester, Marina Del Rey, Venice and West Los Angeles.

"This is the first time we've done this," said Broide. She and others carried signs that read "Who Owns Public Space?" and "Ban Billboard Blight."

"The electronic billboards seem to be an epidemic," she said. "As I drove on my way here this morning, I witnessed the installation of second electronic sign on a single business property, two blocks from my home."

Standing at a busy intersection on Santa Monica Boulevard, Broide called the changing signs "a tremendous danger to the drivers and pedestrians. Those signs are designed to distract drivers to push a movie or a commercial item."

Darryl Lara, an assistant deputy for the city's Department of Building and Safety said the City of Los Angeles was in support of cataloging effort.

"We're working closely with the community today. We have a deep appreciation of what they are trying to do," Lara said.

"This is a big task and, by far, a monumental task," he said. "It's very important for us, as a department, to make sure that the people's wishes are executed."

One new billboard, pasted to the side of an office building on the Santa Monica (405) Freeway in Palms, has introduced a six-story-high, fluorescent- orange taco into the surrounding residential neighborhood.

According Rosendahl, there are an estimated 4,000 billboards in the city, and efforts to find them have been hampered by lawsuits filed by the billboard industry over imposing the fees needed to cover the cost of inspectors. Rosendahl earlier this month introduced an motion on Oct. 3 to get an inventory of signs in his Westside district.

"If Pasadena, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills can survive and thrive without billboards, why can't we (Los Angeles)," Rosendahl said. "The next question is: `City Attorney, what are you going to do with this data -- and what are the rules, what are the laws, what are the rights (of the citizens)."

City attorney Rocky Delgadillo has been criticized for accepting extensive campaign contributions from the billboard industry, and for engineering a "compromise" billboard regulation scheme that critics say has opened up the way for billboards to spread.