(News)

The county's public transit agency is restoring bus shelters to five locations where they were removed by a billboard company.

And a spokesman for Port Authority of Allegheny County says the agency is open to exploring the idea of attracting advertising to those shelters --- and sharing the revenues with the city.

It's a somewhat positive development in an ongoing story that began several weeks ago, when Baton Rouge, La., based Lamar Advertising began removing 21 bus shelters in a dispute over the royalty paid to the city.

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As first reported by the Daily News, under a 10-year contract signed in 1999, Lamar paid the city $15,000 for the right to erect the bus shelters on local streets. With annual revenues topping $1 billion, Lamar is the nation's largest operator of billboards.

The city had an option to renew the contract --- signed with a different company that was merged into Lamar --- for $25,000 per year.

When the contract expired last year, however, Lamar offered the city only $2,000, citing a national downturn in advertising that caused the company's revenues to slide.

The city rejected the payment as unrealistically low and Lamar began disassembling the shelters, leaving bus riders out in the rain.

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City Administrator Dennis Pittman then asked Port Authority for help.

"Even though those shelters did serve Port Authority stops, the agreement was sort of out of our control," says Jim Ritchie, spokesman for the transit agency, "but we heard from a lot of riders when those shelters started disappearing."

Within the next two weeks, weather permitting, Port Authority will install shelters along Lysle Boulevard at Coursin Street, Evans Avenue, Market Street and one additional location yet to be decided, Ritchie says.

"Those are four or five of our more widely used stops," he says. Not all of the shelters Lamar is removing will be replaced, Ritchie says, since some stops were eliminated with Port Authority's recent realignment of Mon-Yough local bus service.

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City officials also would like to explore the possibility of attracting advertising to those shelters, and Ritchie says the agency is "not at all opposed" to the idea.

"We're happy to do this much, and we want to keep working with McKeesport," he says.