Crossing the Aisle

On March 21, the second day of spring, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 to approve the landmark, $875 billion, health-care reform bill. Voting epitomized partisanship as not a single Republican voted for it, while 34 Democrats also voted against it. When other landmark, health-care legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, was passed in 1965, a slight majority of Republicans (70-68) voted for the measure.

By the time you read this, the ISA Sign Expo 2010 in Orlando will be in the record books. The day the show closed, ISA representatives, as well as people from the United States Sign Council (USSC) and the Signage Foundation Inc., were busy on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, exhibiting at the April 10-13 National Planning Conference of the American Planning Assn. (APA) in New Orleans. Six of the 78 APA exhibitors came from the on-premise sign industry. Besides these three groups, sign-industry exhibitors included Peachtree City Foamcraft, the Jim Pattison Sign Group and Skyline Electronic Price Displays.

With three nonprofit entities, the sign industry was well represented. It needed to be. The only other apparent trade associations exhibiting were the Brick Industry Assn. and the Vinyl Siding Institute.

The APA website listed 92 pages of sessions. All sessions were categorized under one or more of the 49 topics. The only one that mentioned signage, “Advances in Signs and Regulation,” was held on Sunday at 7:30 a.m. The two speakers were attorney John Baker and law professor Daniel Mandelker, best known to the sign industry as a co-author of both the seminal Street Graphics (1971) and Street Graphics and the Law (1988). The session was listed under the topic of “law,” but not “economic development.”

Mandelker bastardized the research of experimental psychologist Dr. George A. Miller when he wrote Street Graphics. Miller responded in a lengthy letter published in ST’s April 1973 issue. A specific Miller observation embodies Mandelker’s cavalier interpretations of his research: “But the modification completely changes the meaning. Indeed, it changes the sentence from one that I believe might be true into one that is certainly false.”
On the APA website, the other speaker, Baker, was lauded as the person who helped Minnetonka, MN “to block operation of digital LED billboards” and Arden Hills, MN to “successfully establish that conversion of a static sign to a digital LED sign constitutes an ‘expansion’ of its use, thus requiring city approval.”

I wonder how they view signs.

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Under the topic of “economic development,” the APA website listed 40 sessions. I wonder if any of them considered signage germane.

Against this backdrop, the three sign-industry groups presented an alternative view. ISA and USSC each exhibited for the fourth consecutive year. And there has been success. USSC legislative consultant Rick Crawford said its booth was interactive this year. Penn State researcher Philip Garvey, who has coordinated myriad research projects on USSC’s behalf, brought a light meter so planners could see how luminance in signs can be measured.

From past conferences, Crawford said a Flagstaff, AZ, car dealer was able to get a sign four times bigger than originally allowed by presenting USSC data. A New Jersey planner endorsed larger signs in a code, based on USSC input. Copies of Penn State research were available.

“We try to engage as many planners as possible,” Crawford said.

Similarly, David Hickey, the ISA director, government relations, said a Michigan consultant who visited the ISA booth helped write a new sign code based on ISA information. After the fact, an Ohio planner called ISA for information about a sign-code issue.

At the expo, ISA handed out one-page fliers that explained the distinction between on- and off-premise signage, copies of the Signline newsletter and information about appropriate brightness levels for electronic message centers.
Hickey said not everyone is interested, but “it’s getting better. I find they appreciate it.”
As a first-time exhibitor, the Signage Foundation had copies of the model sign code, “A Framework for On-premise Sign Regulations,” that had also been available at the National Signage Research & Education Conference held last October in Cincinnati.

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Individually, many planners have an open mind and want to do the right thing. I applaud the efforts of ISA, USSC and the Signage Foundation, much as I endorse the efforts of Christian missionaries in Arabic countries. Perhaps only the Holy Trinity could sway the collective APA’s anti-sign sentiments.