August 14, 2007 12:35 am
Next month the Stafford Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on an ordinance aimed at making significant changes in what kinds of commercial signs can be put up along the county's highways and byways.
The proposed regulations are the result of questions raised late last year by the Planning Commission when it noticed that three large electronic billboards--large, colorful LED-type signs--had appeared in the county. This new technology took official Stafford by surprise. Two thoughts leapt to the planning commissioners' minds: blots on the landscape and distractions to drivers.
In December, the planners asked the supervisors for directions on what should be done.
In February the board replied that it was a complex issue. There had been no significant changes in sign ordinances in the county in decades. Meanwhile, a rapidly developing Stafford had blossomed with signs.
The supervisors asked the planners to come up with proposals. The Planning Commission turned for advice to the Virginia Department of Transportation, which is in charge of all the public roads in the state.
Through the winter and spring and into the summer, the planning staff, the supervisors and VDOT kicked around a number of ideas, held public hearings and proposed changes. Finally, in mid-July, an ordinance emerged. It goes to the supervisors in September. It pretty much rewrites the old rules.
The principal proposals deal with billboards--those huge signs common along America's highways for nearly a century. But the ordinance also deals with large business signs and, for the first time, model home signs, which have become a growing presence as housing developments spring from fertile former farmland.
First, the billboards.
Erecting new billboards has been forbidden since the 1980s, when beautification was in vogue and legislation to that effect swept the nation. The principal targets on the roadside were the big signs. Stafford and others passed ordinances forbidding new ones.
The laws "grandfathered" existing billboards. They could stay and be kept in repair, but they could not be moved or replaced.
On the matter of keeping the billboards in good repair, there was a limit on the cost of this maintenance. Advertising companies weren't permitted to spend more than 50 percent of the big signs' replacement costs for repairs. Of course, that meant that environmental groups that wanted the signs down had to wait until they fell down.
Then technology entered the picture. In the past few years, more than 100 large electronic billboards have been built across the country. But not as "new" billboards. The advertising companies used existing billboard structures and converted them to LED eye-catchers.
"Wait a minute," the county said. It pointed out that it costs a lot more than 50 percent of the cost of the original sign to convert it into an electronic wonder.
So the new rules simply forbid new large electronic advertisements. The ordinance defines them as: "Signs that have multiple views and objects that digitally or electronically produce color and/or black and white images similar to a television screen and where such [a] sign exceeds six square feet in area." (The only exceptions are the "time and/or temperature" signs.)
The three existing LED boards in Stafford, are on U. S. 1 just north of the Falmouth light; on U.S. 17 a mile west of the GEICO headquarters; on State Route 610, a few miles west of Garrisonville.
The new ordinance also, for the first time, forbids "multisided-vision signs or display device[s] capable of presenting two or more separate images or ad copy sequentially by rotating multisided cylinders."
The county doesn't have any of these, but anyone traveling south on Interstate 95 has seen them.
The second major focus of the ordinance tightens the rules on putting up commercial signs that are not on the business' property. This means one can't put up a sign down the road from what is being advertised. This affects, for example, hotels, motels, businesses and--a new target--model homes.
As developments burgeon and the housing competition increases, more and bigger signs saying "Model Homes This Way" appear. Not any more, says the ordinance. They can be only on the model home's lot itself. No grandfathering here. As the homes are sold, existing signs will naturally disappear.
Source: The Free Lance Star by Hugh Muir
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