Council pushes forward with changes to city sign code – Rapid City Journal

All digital billboards and city-owned signs could change their advertising messages no more than every eight seconds under code revisions approved Monday by the Rapid City Council.

Aldermen backed away from a full ban on animated business signs, though, voting instead to allow motion on on-premise signs up to 60 square feet in size.

Digital business signs over that size would require a variance and would not be allowed to display anything but static messages. Businesses also would be banned from selling third-party advertising on their on-premise signs.

Over the course of a three-hour working session Monday, the Rapid City Council weighed more than a dozen proposed changes to the city’s sign code.

It was the council’s first substantive conversation on the issue since September of last year, coming nearly a year after a citizen task force first made recommendations for change in June 2011.

All of the changes approved Monday will require two more council readings before they can become official. First reading will likely happen June 4.

The majority of the working session was dedicated to animation on digital billboards and on-premise signs.

The sign code task force had recommended that both kinds of signs be limited to static messages that changed no more than six seconds.

A proposal approved by the council in September had upped the display time to 10 seconds for off-premise signs, but aldermen backtracked Monday to eight seconds, which is the limit recommended by the Federal Highway Administration.

Mayor Sam Kooiker on Monday asked that the council consider a longer hold time – 60 seconds per static message – to limit the distraction to drivers.

“When you’re sitting at a traffic signal and the signs are flipping through at six to eight seconds, it’s less distraction if there’s a slower rotation,” Kooiker said.

But aldermen were wary of deviating from the recommendation of the federal agency, voting 8-2 to approve the eight-second display time for billboards. The two Ward 5 aldermen, Ron Sasso and Bonny Petersen, were the dissenting votes.

“We’re increasing safety by a little bit, hedging on the side of safety…without impacting somebody’s business,” Ward 1 Alderman Charity Doyle said.

Under the approved proposal, no animation would be allowed on billboards or city-owned signs, with the eight-second hold time applying to static messages.

Aldermen never seriously considered extending a similar animation ban to business signs, though, voting unanimously to remove that provision from the draft ordinances.

“We have a lot of businesses that have invested thousands of dollars purely because those signs have that ability,” Ward 2 Alderman Steve Laurenti said. “I think we’re just going a little bit too far.”

But even local sign companies said they could live with a restriction on the maximum size of the digital reader boards, as long as animation still was allowed on the smaller signs.

Eric Farrar, owner of Rosenbaum Signs, suggested the 60-square-foot cutoff approved by the council and said the majority of reader boards in town already fall within those requirements.

“Our sign business could live with that square-footage allowance,” Farrar said. “I don’t think 50 to 60 square feet is out of line.”

City Attorney Joel Landeen said a size restriction also should discourage businesses from selling third-party advertisements on their on-premise sign, another issue the council was trying to address.

During the session, aldermen also killed a proposed amortization clause that would have required nonconforming signs to come into compliance with the city’s sign rules within 10 years.

An exemption for public purpose signs also was eliminated, thus requiring all signs owned by the city and other public entities to follow the same rules as those that are privately owned.

Both changes were approved on a 10-0 vote.

Contact Emilie Rusch at 394-8453 or emilie.rusch@rapidcityjournal.com.