Less than 24 hours after Houston Mayor Bill White announced a landmark deal with Clear Channel Outdoor, six members of Houston’s City Council have voted to delay the plan to tear down hundreds of Houston billboards.

The delay tactic, a process known as “tagging,” is a common strategy used to delay controversial items on the city agenda. On Tuesday, City Council member Pam Holm told 11 News she planned to tag the item.

During Wednesday’s city council meeting, six members of the 14-member council voted to tag the deal: council members Holm, Toni Lawrence, Ronald Green, Ada Edwards, Anne Clutterbuck and Peter Brown. In a discussion before the vote, all six expressed varying degrees of skepticism about the plan.

Under the agreement, Mayor White said that Clear Channel Outdoor had agreed to take down about 800 small-to-medium sized billboards throughout the city. Members of the group Scenic Houston, which has long pushed for removal of Houston billboards, argued against the deal – because it included a clause that remaining billboards could be moved to new locations.

That caveat was what pushed so many members of the City Council to delay the plan. Council member Clutterbuck said the relocation allotment amounted to granting new property rights for billboard companies, which has not happened in Houston in 20 years.

“There are so many good aspects of this negotiation, but I’m concerned about granting new property rights,” she said. “We’re allowing new billboard locations to pop up, and they will pop up in disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

Mayor White said the proposal is the best deal the city can get before 2013, when all billboard companies would be required to take down most billboards located in the city of Houston, except billboards located along state and federal highways. Mayor White said he’s worried that in the meantime, the state Legislature may step in and change the rules. In addition, a lawsuit filed by a different billboard company is winding through the federal court system.

“We could take down many more billboards with this deal than under any interpretation of the law,” White said.

The City Council will reconsider the billboard plan at its Dec. 19 meeting.