MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
NWA Times 4 Feb 2006
THE GREAT SIGN
ORDINANCE DEBATE
Fayetteville was cluttered with huge signs when I moved here in 1964. The passage in 1972 of Fayetteville's sign ordinance began a welcome transformation that was not complete until about ten years later as such die-hard businesses as Whit Chevrolet, Holiday Inn, the Donrey media group, Gas-n'-Go, and McIlroy Bank finally ended their legal campaign against the city and removed their oversized signs. Donrey and McIlroy took their cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, while Gas-n'-Go held out until the city went in with cutting torches to remove an illegal sign. The effect was dramatic. Although North College still looks pretty ugly, anyone who saw it before 1972 can attest that it looks a whole lot better now than it did then.
In
1975, some Fayetteville businessmen tried to kill the ordinance. As a
participant in the ensuing debate, I'd like to pass this story on to you. The documentation is from old issues of
the Northwest Arkansas Times and the Grapevine newspaper and interviews with some of the key
players.
The ordinance was and is a strong, detailed document that spelled out minimum sign setbacks, lighting restrictions, the number and size of permitted signs, and so forth. As amended in the summer of 1975, it allowed (and still allows) each business location to have one free-standing sign of up to 75 square feet, plus one wall sign of up to 150 square feet on each wall (maximum of four wall signs).
The controversy began at a city board meeting (we had a manager/board form of government then) in September 1975, when Consumers Market of Springfield, Missouri, requested a variance for huge free-standing and wall signs of about 500 square feet for its store on North College Avenue. Consumers Market's Vice President David Glass claimed that smaller signs would not permit proper identification. Directors Morris Collier and Al Hughes vigorously supported this request. Collier claimed that "Our sign ordinance ...is absolutely a hindrance to any businessman in this town. When that sign is prepared for use nationally ...then why should Fayetteville deny you the right to put that sign in Fayetteville?" But the board denied the variance, whereupon Collier vowed to "muster support from the business community to get that ordinance amended within the next two weeks."
The
Grapevine, an influential weekly
"alternative" newspaper, ran editorials criticizing Glass, Collier,
Hughes, and Consumers Market, with a cartoon dramatizing the huge dimensions of
the proposed signs.
Recalling the days in the 1950s when a tree-lined North College
"was described as one of the loveliest streets in the land," the Grapevine opined that "[today] the trees have all been chopped
down and replaced with various plastic and neon signs. College Avenue could just as well be
Anyplace, USA."
City Director John Todd informed me that some business people were mobilizing behind an amendment to allow signs of up to 300 square feet for free-standing signs and 750 square feet for wall signs, effectively destroying the sign ordinance. Todd, who supported the ordinance, believed that only an active citizen's movement could save it.
Former
Mayor Sylvia Swartz, businessman Frank Sharp (President of the Ozark Mountain
Smokehouse restaurants), and I discussed the situation and decided to mount a
public campaign. We enlisted over
70 good citizens to publicize and circulate petitions to save the sign
ordinance. The Northwest Arkansas Times
ran a supportive editorial titled "NO Sign Amendment!"
The amendment was on the agenda at the next board meeting. After its first reading, Collier moved to immediately put it on second reading, hoping to push it to a vote that night. This motion received a 4-3 vote, just short of the 5-2 majority needed to go to second reading. Fayetteville had, for that evening and by the narrowest of margins, saved its sign ordinance. If it had gone to a third and final vote that evening, the amendment would have prevailed and the ordinance would have been gutted. We can thank Marion Orton, John Todd, and Paul Noland, for the three votes that saved the ordinance.
The
petition campaign got into high gear a few days after that board meeting. By the next board meeting, after only
one week of petitioning, over 2200 names had been obtained--an amazing number
that quite impressed the city's board.
Director Russell Purdy, who had proposed the amendment, offered to
withdraw its major provisions in favor of a face-saving substitute. Collier seconded the motion, which was
then put on second and third reading and passed 7-0. The ordinance was preserved. Although it's been updated throughout the years, it remains
a strong document. In my opinion,
smart business people today support the ordinance, because a beautiful city is
good for business.
There are many lessons in this story. In the 1960s, it would have been considered utopian to suggest that the advertising clutter on North College and elsewhere could tamed. The clutter seemed normal. But a few visionaries, thinking beyond present-day "normality," passed the 1972 ordinance, and three years later 2200 such people signed a petition that preserved that ordinance. The lesson is that things CAN change, and citizen activism pays off.
Today, we have a mayor who would like to make North College the civilized avenue that it can be. We have a city planning staff that is open to traffic calming, trails, mass transit, and making downtown a thriving, walkable, livable urban place. We can have the Fayetteville of our dreams, if we have the brains and the vision to understand the possibilities, and if citizens take the action into their own hands.