They have overrun suburban strips and main streets in small cities. Now there is a move afoot at Minneapolis City Hall to stop the proliferation of digital signs throughout neighborhood commercial districts.
Electronic sign technology first popped up in Minneapolis in
downtown's entertainment district, soon spread to billboards in industrial locations overlooking freeways, and then progressed to smaller signs at neighborhood businesses.
But Minneapolis is getting ready to roll back the last of those three changes to city code, says council member Gary Schiff, who chairs the city council's
zoning and planning committee.
The council approved commercial LED signs in neighborhoods as part of an overhaul of city ordinances last year, but without realizing what so-called "dynamic" signs really were, says Schiff.
"Now we have a year's worth of these signs in place," says Schiff, citing an Uptown hardware store as an example of the new wave he's hoping to stop. If every store in a neighborhood commercial zone were to convert to a digital sign like Frattalone's, he warns, it would be a "drastic change for the character of the neighborhood business districts."
Schiff wants to prevent what he observed recently in Mankato, where "every bank, every church" has a digital sign, creating a "mini-Las Vegas."
The
city planning commission will hold a public hearing on removing the provision that has allowed electronic signs outside businesses, varying in size with the amount of street frontage the business has. If approved, the measure would then move to Schiff's committee and the full council over the next few months.
Source: Gary Schiff, Minneapolis City Council
Writer: Chris Steller