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EDITORIAL: Gimme a Sign... A Nice Looking One, Please |
Bill Hudson | 3/24/08
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Downtown Pagosa restaurant owner Pat Kahn stepped up to the podium at last Thursday’s standing-room-only community meeting, and addressed the Town Council.
“My problem is, I feel like the Town is micro-managing. Let us have some of our signage. Let us have some of our banners, so we get people into town. We need to let them know what’s going on.”
The Town Council had convened the Thursday night meeting expressly to hear ideas from the business community about revitalizing a frighteningly sluggish economy. Most speakers focused on recently imposed impact fees — especially the ‘Water Resource Fee’ levied by the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District — as important hindrances to economic growth.
Kahn was one of the few who addressed the Town’s sign restrictions as a stumbling block. “Stop micro-managing. I know you need the rules, but stop micro-managing and let us run our businesses — let us keep our employees and stay in business. That’s my idea.” Continued...
At certain periods of Pagosa's history, the use of signage has been understated and restrained, producing an uncluttered visual effect in our business district. Is it time, now, for a substantially more cluttered appearance? |
At the end of the meeting — which, as a work session, did not allow any voting on the part of the Town Council — Councilor Mark Weiler made a couple of proposals based on the input he’d heard over the past week. One of Weiler’s proposals referred to signage.
“Item number two. I propose at our next Town Council meeting, that we have a moratorium on our sign and banner [codes]. If you want to do it, you put your signs out. We’re going to try it out for the rest of this year.”
Weiler’s suggestion drew applause from the audience.
One might get the impression, from these comments, that effective business signage was non-existent in Pagosa Springs — and that sign regulations play a key role in the economic woes the community is currently suffering.
As a former sign painter — in the business for 15 years — I’d like to offer a few of reflections on Kahn's and Weiler's suggestions.
 When I first moved to Pagosa Springs, I was struck immediately by the poor quality of the signs used by businesses here. Many of the signs were amateurish in design and executed on poor quality substrates such as construction-quality plywood and Masonite. Many of the signs were in deplorable condition and needed desperately to be replaced. Obviously, many business owners did not believe that the quality of their signs reflected on the quality of the business inside the building.
About that time, the Town was writing its first sign regulations, which, as I recall, were then revised and updated about five years ago.
The overall appearance of the town’s business signs have improved greatly over the past 15 years, and I credit at least some of that improvement to the Town’s sign regulations, which require business owners to do some advance thinking about their signage plans — and make their signs look attractive and professional, for the sake of the whole community's appearance.
Pagosa Springs’ sign code is only mildly restrictive compared with the sign codes adopted by some other Colorado towns. Pagosa’s sign code, for example, includes 12 pages of rules and descriptions. If you look at the town of Steamboat Springs for comparison, you will find a sign code that runs twice that length — 24 pages.
In Pagosa, a business with reasonable street frontage is allowed a sign up to 100 square feet. The town of Telluride, by comparison, limits businesses to just 20 square feet — but then, Telluride is basically a walking town, where signs are viewed at pedestrian distances. In Steamboat, a town similar to Pagosa where signs are more typically viewed from a moving vehicle, the maximum square footage is 120 square feet — even though signs in the pedestrian parts of downtown Steamboat are typically much smaller than that.
Since most Pagosa business owners would never need — and perhaps could not afford — a professionally-made sign larger than 100 square feet, our sign code mainly prevents a rich business owner from dominating the skyline with monster signage. The code also prevents a junky community appearance by limiting the number of cheap — and cheap-looking — temporary banners that a business can string up.
A sign is an important advertising tool, but it has its built-in limitations. A big, glaring sign for a restaurant is not likely to make a person walk in, unless that person is already looking for a restaurant in the first place. More often, the sign simply needs to inform the hungry customer that he has indeed found the restaurant he’d already picked out in the Yellow Pages or on the Internet.
A dozen signs of poor quality, plastered all over the outside of a business, do not necessarily generate more business than one high quality sign, properly placed and, ideally, enhanced with landscaping.
Just such a focus on high quality and minimal visual clutter seems to be the basic idea behind the Town sign regulations, if we look carefully at the code.
One of our most popular downtown restaurants, Alley House Grille, has a single, elegantly simple sign, sandblasted into a piece of granite. The sign is neither large nor garish, yet the restaurant regularly does an excellent business. Meanwhile, other restaurants with much larger and more numerous signs struggle to fill their tables.
The suggestion that we institute a moratorium on sign regulations and allow "anything and everything" to appear as signage in our business district — as a temporary fix to a complex and systemic economic problem — is not a reasonable solution. We would be encouraging a blight on the cityscape, generated by desperate business owners on tight budgets ordering the cheapest, largest signs possible to try and attract customers.
And what happens with the business owner who has spent $5,000 on new signs during a moratorium — only to be told on January 1, 2009, that the moratorium is over and his signs are no longer allowed?
Weiler and Kahn no doubt have their hearts in the right place, and both are justified in expecting the Town to help Pagosa businesses get through the current economic downturn.
But throwing out our sign code, even temporarily, is not likely to make Pagosa Springs more attractive to visitors... or to investors. |
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