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Lake County targets unsightly signs

Lake County targets unsightly signs

by DeVore Design, January 26, 2016

I buy junk cars! Home for sale! Ballroom dancing! Donate your boat! Brazilian Jiu-jitsu!

Those are familiar “snipe signs” along the roadways of Lake County. They’re a small, usually foam core, professionally printed sign mounted on a wire frame that is easy to push into the ground.

Somebody can jump out of a car at an intersection and plant one in the right-of-way in a flash. But the opposite applies, too. People who don’t like visual litter — and they are illegal — also can yank them right out in a split second.

Is it legal to do that? It is, according to county officials. And maybe that’s what folks who care about trash in Lake County should do.

On Tuesday, Lake Commissioner Leslie Campione raised the question of how to better deal with the proliferation of signs and asked the county manager to look into a wily method of stopping the advertisers that Orange County has been trying for the last couple years.

Campione had just gotten an email from a Mount Plymouth woman who said she has been fighting snipe signs in road rights-of-way for several years because “it makes our neighborhood look trashy.”

Indeed, it does. And that makes Karen Moss crazy. It should pique us all.

“I call, and I don’t care if they know my name. The county takes the signs down, and next week, they’ll be back up,” Moss said. “It’s an ongoing thing.”

She is annoyed because county officials won’t pick up snipe signs unless they’re called. The county’s policy on code enforcement is that officers respond only to complaints — they don’t go looking for business because the small staff struggles just to keep up with complaints.

Still, code officers sometimes sweep through areas where folks regularly object to the snipe signs, such as the intersection of State Road 46 and County Road 435, said Brian Sheahan, who is the director of the county’s Department of Conservation & Compliance. They clear that area about once a week. Last week, officers drove Alfred Street in Tavares to Mount Dora, snagging up the signs along the way. They’re taken to the county dump for disposal.

Signs advertising businesses in road right-of-way aren’t allowed in Lake, Sheahan said. Occasionally, the county will issue a permit for someone to post directional or informational signs for a short period, but the rest, including political signs, should not be posted next to roads or tacked to power poles.

A couple years ago, Orange officials began trying an aggressive approach to rid roadways of snipe signs. The county owns a robo-dialer, so officials used it to jam the telephone lines of the businesses that are the most persistent about snipe signs.

Did it work?

“It’s hard to know. We didn’t get a lot of feedback from the violators,” said Robert Spivey, manager of Orange’s code-enforcement division.

Still, he said, officers suspect it doesn’t work very well.

“My best guess is that it isn’t a silver bullet. It is somewhat helpful — a small part of the solution,” he said. “I wish it was a bigger success,”

Orange’s snipe sign problem is far larger than Lake’s: Code-enforcement officers in Orange collect more than 100,000 signs a year in the 700-square-mile unincorporated area of the county. The county plans to spend $100,000 this year on snipe signs alone and expects to seize more than 300,000 signs. It’s all because residents have pushed officials to do it.

The idea, Spivey said, is to deprive the businesses of nearly free advertising that results in cluttering the roadways. The signs typically cost $1 a piece or less, depending on whether they’re printed on both sides and how much color ink is used.

Sheahan said he has seen a recent uptick in complaints. Last year, he said, he got “maybe one complaint.” The first three weeks of January have yielded five. One company that buys cars has begun bolting its signs to metal street signs, forcing county officials to use bolt cutters.

One cost-free way to get rid of the signs is something that governments don’t like to talk about because they’re nervous about safety: Dip into the reservoir of residents. You are perfectly free to rid your neighborhood of these tacky nuisance signs.

Now, don’t trespass on someone else’s property. Don’t stop traffic. Don’t meander into the road. Just pluck those bad boys from the ground if they’re in the right of way and tuck them into your garbage can. Bye-bye, clutter.

Here’s one resident who will be doing her part. After all, we can’t expect government to do everything.

Lritchie@tribune.com. Lauren invites you to send her a friend request on Facebook at www.facebook.com/laurenonlake.