The City of Detroit is sticking to its deadline of next week to remove nearly all large building signs in and around downtown, a big loss for property owners who have been netting $4,000 to $10,000 a month renting out their wall space to popular brands.

Because the signs are in violation of city code, owners who fail to take them down will be issued misdemeanor tickets and fines starting the following week, said Tiffany Crawford, deputy press secretary for the city. Details on the amount of these potential fines were not available Friday.

"Once the tickets have been issued, we will give the owners five days to complete the removal of the signs and if nothing has been done, additional blight fines will follow," Crawford said Friday in an e-mail.

At least one property owner is ready to defy City Hall and keep his building's sign up.

Savvas Kazelas, 68, owner of Nick's Gaslight restaurant, 441 Grand River Ave., said he is not removing the Detroit Pistons sign featuring point guard Reggie Jackson that hangs on the side of his restaurant.

“I don’t plan to,” Kazelas said. “I’ve been downtown 40 years. They aren’t going to chase me out of town.”

Kazelas said he blames "hanky panky" in City Hall as the reason why officials are going after him and other small business owners to take down their signs. He worries that the city could later allow some downtown building signs in the future, but only in specific areas benefiting certain property owners.

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“It’s some shady stuff," he said. "They want to give it to certain people only."

David Bell, director of the city's Buildings, Safety Engineering and Environmental Department, responded to the restaurant owner's assertions.

“We make it our priority to have all business with advertising banners to come into compliance and to adhere to the sign ordinance," Bell said in an e-mail. "Not only is a baseless assertion like that ridiculous, it is also reckless.”

Kazelas also predicted future legal action against the city aimed at forcibly allowing all the signs to stay up or go back up.

"The story is not over yet," he said. "Believe me, it’s not going to be over that easily.”

Although Detroit's restrictions on downtown-area building signs date to the late 1990s, the city didn't begin enforcing them until last year. Only a handful of building signs can stay up, such as the giant 17,000-square-foot MGM Grand Detroit ad featuring a lion near Campus Martius, which is permitted under a court decision.

The end-of-year deadline is part of an agreement between some building owners and the city. In exchange for the owners taking down the signs, the city agreed to stop issuing fines and misdemeanor tickets for having them up.

Previous city tickets began with $200 fines, escalating to $400 fines, $1,500 fines, then criminal misdemeanors, according to sign industry sources. Property forfeiture is a potential last step that the city could take against building owners.

The specific prohibition is against large advertising signs, billboards and painted wall graphics within a roughly 15-square-mile area from the Detroit River out to East and West Grand Boulevard in all directions.

Dozens of signs for popular brands and products such as Apple's new iPhone X will have to come down or face a fine.

Detroit-based outdoor ad company Brooklyn Outdoor has hired work crews to remove 15 to 20 building signs next week. Andrus McDonald, president of real estate for the company, which normally contracts with advertising agents who pay to place building signs, said they've turned down numerous brands that sought to buy ad space in Detroit next year.

“We’ve been saying 'no' to all these national advertisers for months because they’ve been trying to buy for Q1 2018,” he said, referring to the first quarter of the new year. "Now they’re just going to cross Detroit off their marketing plan, and the people who are going to be hurt the most are the building owners.”

He added, “These building owners are the ones who really held down Detroit back when no businesses wanted to be down here, and Apple didn’t want to buy the side of a wall."

Contact JC Reindl: 313-222-6631 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @JCReindl.