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APPROVED 5/4/16 3 Michael Harvey: Well it’s a county and municipality issue. It is also a preference issue where communities adopt 106 regulations forwarding their own concepts of acceptability. 107 108 Tony Blake: Sounds like a DOT issue. 109 110 Michael Harvey: It’s a little bit of both. If the sign is on private property, DOT has no regulatory authority. We would. 111 Signs erected in a public right-of-way are their purview. 112 113 James Lea: So it looks like we’re going to put a regulation outlining what constitutes a flashing sign meaning a sign 114 can’t flash but only so often in a day correct. 115 116 Michael Harvey: Currently flashing, blinking signs are illegal. We are actually going to allow them so long as the 117 message only changes a certain amount of times in a given hour. They’re currently prohibited in Orange County. 118 We’re actually creating an allowance where you can have digital signage so long as the message doesn’t change but 119 a certain number of times an hour. Our problem currently is that we have no measureable standard to outline what is 120 and is not legal. 121 122 Michael Harvey continued presentation. 123 124 Tony Blake: Would it make more sense to base the square footage of the signage on the amount of road frontage or 125 the amount of area that’s visible to the public? I’m just kicking that around because it seems like this is somewhat 126 more arbitrary that what I would’ve expected and the other part of it is that you may be creating a market for signage. 127 If I’m only using 150 square feet of my signage, can I sell my signage allotment to someone else? 128 129 Michael Harvey: No, you can’t. 130 131 James Lea: What district does churches fall in on this table? 132 133 Michael Harvey: Churches are allowed in every (general use zoning) district we have. 134 135 James Lea: Because I know that some of them have nice signs that change. 136 137 Michael Harvey: For example, a church developed in the LC1 zoning district could have 172 square foot signage. A 138 church developed in the industrial district could have more signage. 139 140 Michael Harvey continued presentation. 141 142 Paul Guthrie: I think what would clarify and get focus on exactly where you’re going… Understand what this case did. 143 It was brought by a church that had no basic place for church services, so it moved around the community. They put 144 up temporary signs for a period of days, time where it was going to be each Sunday. And those weren’t taken down 145 over time and they got cited over time. That was the original cite. So they went in to court on both freedom of speech 146 and the fact that they were a church, and where the court got people in a pickle was this language, the sign content 147 based restrictions do not survive strict scrutiny because the town has not demonstrated that the code differentiation 148 between temporary directional signs and other types of signs further a compelling dominant interest and is narrowly 149 taled to that ending. That’s what he’s playing with right now. Is trying to meet that standard, and it’s a very tough 150 standard to meet. 151 152 Michael Harvey: Building on Paul’s point… The town’s ordinance (Reed versus Gilbert) said that if you have a 153 temporary sign announcing a special event you could have it up 72 hours before the event and has to be removed 154 within 24. If you have an off site directional sign it can only be up for 12 hours and has to be removed within the hour 155 the event ceases. So the issue was what is the sign this church is erecting. Is it a special event? No. Is it directional? 156 Yes, but it has this shelf life. So I, as the zoning officer, had to read the sign to determine what type of sign it was. 157 And enforce the ordinance appropriately. So I was basing my determination on content, not on the size of the sign, 158 not on what it was, or placement. And I was treating the signs of the same shape, size, everything different. Based on 159