Remember that little story we chose to follow a few months ago about the Pastor with a roaming church who refused to accept that his town’s sign regulations were fair? If you need a refresher, recently in the small Arizona town of Gilbert, there exists a small but loyal church congregation. Due to a lack of funds, this church has no official church house and church members never know for sure where it will meet the following Sunday. Because of this, the pastor of the church has been force to go out and put up signs around town in hopes that his congregational flock will see them and know where and when church services will be held on Sunday.
The process seems straightforward enough, but when the pastor began being hit with citations for his signs is when the problem arose and grew into a lengthy court debate that progressed all the way to the Supreme Court. The pastor’s main reasoning throughout the whole legal proceedings was that his town’s sign regulations were limiting his freedom of speech as a citizen. The regulations played favorites in regards to certain types of signs, allowing some to stay up longer and be displayed in different areas longer than others based primarily on the content of the signs. No one could have seen the issue going this far – not even the Supreme Court judges themselves who ultimately ruled unanimously in favor of the pastor.
But as a result of this decision, Gilbert, Arizona (the town in question) is now being forced to reform their sign regulations to accommodate the Supreme Court’s ruling, but they aren’t alone. The court’s ruling was not exclusive to just Gilbert, but to the country as a whole.
Most recently an article appeared on flaglerlive.com talking about the new changes in the city of Palm Coasts’s sign regulations.
With an election year on the horizon and the candidates not wasting any time hitting the campaign trail, already people are beginning to throw their support behind their favorite candidates which means it’s political yard sign season yet again. On top of that, with fall just around the corner and Florida summers notorious for their brutal temperatures, the number of garage sales will be sure to go up. And as anyone who has ever advertised for a yard sale can tell you, your success is directly related to the visibility of your yard sale signs and if the city is changing some of their regulations, the people will need to know about it so they can plan accordingly.
With this landmark ruling in the world of sign regulations, we encourage all of our fans and friends to check out their county’s and state’s new and revised sign regulations. Here at Custom Signs we create a variety of high quality custom and stock signs for our customers to utilize as they see fit. From restroom signs, to no smoking signs and more – we pride ourselves in our dedication to our superior grade materials and products as well as our devotion to our customers.