Mooresville councilman presents UDO amendment on signs

MOORESVILLE — For more than a year, officials in Mooresville have been talking about signs in town rights-of-way.

Last year, yard signs started to be removed from town rights-of-way.

These signs included campaign signs as politicians were out barnstorming for votes in the 2020 Primary Election.

Back in 2019, the town’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) was updated and notes that signs can’t be installed in public rights-of-way “unless specifically authorized by the legislative body or their designee.”

Mooresville Town Councilman Dustin Stanley, however, is hoping to amend the UDO as it pertains to signage.

Under Stanley’s amendment, small yard signs would be permitted “in a right-of-way adjacent to private property that is maintained by that property owner or tenant and placed with permission of that owner or tenant.”

It would also allow yard signs to be placed by a governmental unit, like the town’s park system, in property that is governed by the unit.

The yard signs would be allowed to be up for no more than 60 days under Stanley’s presented amendment.

The amendment, though, would ban signs from being installed in a “publicly owned or maintained landscape feature.”

Those landscape features include flower beds and planters.

Earlier this week, Stanley — who served on the council when the original UDO was approved — said that the ordinance was never intended to be used as it has been over the last year.

“Unfortunately, it is so blanket and just vague enough that it can be used, apparently, for ‘no signs in Mooresville,’” Stanley said.

“It was basically intended for if somebody put out a sign and left it there for months on end, we had the authority to pull it after it had run its course,” Stanley noted.

Stanley noted that he voted in favor of the UDO in its entirety at the time.

~ By Lance Gideon | Reporter | Published May 28, 2021 in The Mooresville Times

** You can read the proposed ordinance here