2023 Sign Ordinance Update

Since 2020, we’ve been hearing about how small yard signs are “garbage” and make the town look “trashy”. We’ve seen pink stickers emerge and get plastered on signs all over town every election cycle, and at a few other times as well, ever since that first Rainwater sign photo was cropped and posted by a town councilman who claimed Libertarians are criminals. It’s become a staple of Town life in Mooresville to wait for the Sign Police to come and take your “Just Be Kind” sign, your “Slow: Children At Play” sign, or your political sign out of your yard because they claim it’s not in the right place.

So, what happened? Where is the sign purging this year? This election cycle hasn’t seen any bright pink “This Sign Violates the Mooresville Sign Ordinance” stickers. Candidates aren’t driving around town reporting their opponent’s signs or, at least, if they are, no one is doing anything about it. Why?

As it turns out, the town amended the sign ordinance at their December 20, 2022 meeting to be effective January 1st, of 2023. While the town did not implement all our recommendations, they did take our most important suggestions. Here’s what changed:

First, the position of sign administrator was eliminated. The existence of this position was in direct violation of state law. State law says you either tell everyone ‘yes’, or everyone ‘no’. Therefore, the existence of an administrator to grant or deny permission was itself a violation. We are pleased to report the new UDO eliminates this position altogether and therefore defaults all requests to place signage on public property as a ‘no’.

A section has been added suspending the rules for number of signs and size of the signs 60 days prior to and 6 days after an election. This brings the ordinance in-line with state law that also says size and number of signs cannot be restricted during an election period. This section also codifies that you must obtain permission from private property owners before placing a sign. An important point given one council member threatened to fill his opponents yard with signs because that property “is no different from a park”.

There was another striking of the phrase “Located only on the same lot as the use/business” from the regulation tables for temporary signage. We’re not sure if this was an attempt to clarify the strip of your property nearest the street as your property or not. It could just be that it was redundant with the other statement in the table. “No sign shall project beyond the property line into the public right-of-way”. As far as we can tell the “that’s not your property” theory, in relation to the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street, only came from Councilman Williams. He has never backed that up with anything that states an easement is not your property, but it was certainly his interpretation that you couldn’t put signs there. This may be the section he used to justify that; it may not be.

The Libertarian Party of Morgan County had sought to allow a 90-day time limit for signage without permission, but these changes are an acceptable compromise. Our main points of being an undue burden on the public, a silly waste of taxpayer money to try and enforce, and potentially easily corrupt uses of leveraging the “permission” requirements to censor the free speech of Mooresville Citizens have been addressed. We would like to have seen clarification on whether or not we can put signs in easements or not (as that has been used to remove signage in the past), but otherwise this addressed the main concerns we have been trying to raise for the last three years. We are happy someone in the town was listening to our concerns when these revisions were written.

You can review the changes yourself below: