I'm actually a part of what is called the design committee for our town. We are made up of a few contractors, an awning guy, the head of zoning, the head of the local main street program, and some local downtown business owners. We have no actual voting power but we do make recommendations to the city council, that for the most part is well received.
The main purpose of the group is to make recommendations on facade grants. The city will use TIF funds to meet a building owner halfway on the lowest bid for renovations and improvements to their buildings facade. The building owner could chose the high bid, but the city only pays for half of the low bid, so the extra costs comes out of the building owner's pocket. In order for that business to receive those funds, the city would have a say on the nature of those revisions. That is where our diverse group comes into play. The group also makes recommendations on things like what planters or light poles should we get downtown. Stuff like that.
Now. Signs aren't a part of the facade grant, but strangely enough sign designs for the downtown only are brought up at meetings. It's never effected us negativity at all. We know our sign codes well so our signs are to code anyway and they look nice, so we have yet to have them turn down one of our proposals, which they can't do anyway, they can just make a recommendation.
It's been brought up at several meeting whether or not we should try to include signs in the facade grants. It's a catch 22 though. If it were, sure we might be able to sell more higher price signs since the city would pay for half, however, it's more likely that business owners would be more attracted to the idea of purchasing the same signs they have always asked for, just at half price, plus these business owners would be required to seek out 2 more bids, which would be less than us anyway sooo... I've always argued that it shouldn't be apart of those grants and have so far managed to convince the rest of the group I'm right. For now.
We've also discussed rewriting the sign code a few times, but honestly the code we have now isn't all that bad and isn't enforced well anyway. To open it up for review has the real possibility of making things worst, since the majority of the people putting their 2 cents in would be non sign makers anyway.
Like I said the enforcement of our sign code isn't that great. Here again it's a catch 22. The head of zoning is a great guy, he just has too much on his plate. The bad part is, some regional sign shops will do work in town and not build things to code. When it's not enforced we look bad when we tell our clients that you can't do this or that, and they respond with, yeah buy so and so's business does. However if we were to make it a point to turn in every sign not made by us that is out of code, not only will we attract negitive attention back onto ourselves from zoning, but we will get a bad reputation from those business owners that are cited for zoning violations. So we keep our mouth's shut and we continue to follow the rules since they aren't that big of a deal anyway.
