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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Sign panel presents options

Spokane Valley’s sign code is headed back to city leaders and remains as contentious as ever among some business owners.

Next week, the Planning Commission will hear recommendations from a committee summoned by the City Council after enforcement efforts a year ago provoked a backlash from Sprague Avenue retailers.

Two members were added to Spokane Valley’s sign committee to represent car dealers and small businesses. But one resigned in frustration, and the other is still angered by regulations she says unfairly punish retailers who can’t afford large signs.

“It’s never going to be beautiful,” Nancy Nishimura said of Sprague Avenue, where she owns Green Thumb Nursery. “For me it’s a business district. The purpose is for the businesses to do business to generate revenue,” she said.

Like many cited for sign violations, Nishimura owned an illegal reader board and said her business has declined because she couldn’t use it to advertise her specials.

The prohibited off-site and portable signs are crucial to small retailers in Spokane Valley, she said, because many are in strip malls or locations that don’t face traffic.

“This is the Valley. It was developed in a very strange way,” she said.

The committee’s latest recommendations don’t change the rules prohibiting sandwich boards, reader boards or off-premise pole signs, although they do loosen a few requirements for signs at offices and along aesthetic corridors.

“We don’t have a lot of changes built into it this time around,” said planning commissioner and sign committee member David Crosby.

About two and a half years ago, he and six members representing sign companies, business organizations and a grocery chain reviewed the sign code the city inherited from Spokane County.

Most of the code stayed the same, although Spokane County hasn’t actively enforced the rules since they were enacted in 1991.

“The overall feel is we want to promote business in Spokane Valley,” Crosby said of the latest changes.

But there’s still disagreement on how that happens.

“It was already kind of written in concrete what they wanted,” said Jennifer Johnson, who resigned from the committee after two meetings.

“They were all about big signs, spending money on signs,” she said.

Like Nishimura, Johnson suspects the sign regulations hurt her business at Jennifer’s Auto Sales and her repair shop last year.

If they are in good repair, she argues, the flags, pennants and sandwich boards are interesting additions to the landscape.

The committee eventually recommended that pennants without ad copy on them shouldn’t be regulated, but those with words on them would require a permit.

After a discussion about signs in front of Gus Johnson Ford, the committee also recommended that small “emblems” like those at the car dealership be allowed on light poles.

Parts of the code outline the size, location and, in the case of the emblems, even the material of different signs and decorations – things Nishimura said the city shouldn’t worry about given the impact of bigger problems like crime.

Spokane County and Spokane don’t bother to enforce their codes, she said. “Why does the city of Spokane Valley think they have time to do this when they have even more limited resources?”