Group recommends easing banner rules

Somewhat to their own surprise, the members of a citizen group studying Chesterfield County’s rules for advertising banners agreed last week on a proposed rewrite of the county ordinance to send to the Planning Commission for consideration.

At its final meeting on Friday, the county’s banner study group agreed, with only a few last-minute changes, to a set of amendments that are hoped to give businesses and nonprofit groups more leeway in using the temporary signs while reducing the number of non-compliant signs and easing the workload of county staffers responsible for enforcing the rules.

Businesses or nonprofits that want to use the cloth signs will still have to apply for permits, and repeat violators would still face the possible penalty of being prohibited from displaying banners for up to a year.

However, businesses would get more time per year to use banners, and nonprofits, such as athletic associations, would be allowed more signs in more locations for purposes such as advertising sign-ups for sports teams.

In some cases, the commission will be given more than one alternative to choose from, partly as a compromise among the sharply differing philosophies members of the committee brought to their task.

The group includes business owners – some of whom admitted they had violated the existing ordinance – as well as citizens who view any restrictions on signs as an infringement of business owners’ rights.

It also included one citizen activist, Bob Olsen, whose numerous complaints about banners were largely responsible for the study group’s creation in the first place. By some estimates, Olsen filed 90 percent of the recent complaints about violations of the ordinance in an effort to spur stricter enforcement.

Planning Manager Greg Allen credited Olsen with driving the county’s reappraisal of its banner rules. “The ordinance is shifting because of people like Bob,” he said, calling Olsen a “super-enforcer.”

The most significant remaining area of disagreement last week was over the section of the ordinance dealing with the length of time a banner can be displayed. While there was solid consensus that businesses should be allowed more than the current 60 days per year, with consecutive days limited to 30, there were two distinct opinions about what the change should be.

Some members believe that there should be no limit on the number of consecutive days a banner could be displayed, arguing that businesses should be free to use all of their annual allotment of days consecutively if they felt that was a sound business decision.

Others, including the Planning Department staff, were concerned that with strip malls limited to two banners at the same time, allowing one or two businesses to keep their signs up for months at a stretch might impair the ability of other mall tenants to advertise.

Likewise, some study group members backed the Planning Department’s recommendation to allow each business a total of 120 days per year for banners, giving them 30 days in each calendar quarter to promote specials or sales. Others, however, believe 90 days a year would be plenty and that allowing 120 days won’t do enough to reduce the visual clutter created by temporary signs.

The compromise the study group reached on that issue was to recommend sending the Planning Commission two options: raise the total number of days to 90 but eliminate the limit on consecutive days, or raise the total days to 120 and set a 60-day limit on consecutive days.

Olsen is one of the members who supported the 90-day limit, but he said after the meeting that the time-limit issue was his biggest concern with the proposal. Overall, he said, there were “some good things that came out of this committee,” especially the changes aimed at helping nonprofits promote their activities.

In any case, the committee’s recommendation is just a step, albeit a big one, in what is likely to be a continuing process. Olsen and Allen were in agreement that whatever changes are ultimately accepted by the Board of Supervisors, it will be advisable to take a year or so to see how they work in practice and then go back and make any changes that appear necessary.

Allen said the proposal will be presented to the Planning Commission at its next work session but probably won’t get to a public hearing before May, with the Board of Supervisors holding an additional public hearing after that. He urged the study group members to continue their work by supporting the plan at those hearings.