My Lunch with Wendy

Planners can be encouraged to learn more about signs. That’s the most important concept I gathered after having lunched with Wendy Moeller. AICP appears on her business card after her name. At least for now.
AICP, which stands for American Institute of Certified Planners, is “the American Planning Assn.’s [APA] professional institute, providing recognized leadership nationwide in the certification of professional planners, ethics, professional development, planning education, and the standards of planning practice.”
Wendy told me about a relatively new APA policy that requires its members to attain 32 hours of accredited training every two years, in order to retain that AICP designation. One-and-a-half hours must pertain to legal matters and a like amount to ethics. So, the sign industry merely needs to create AICP-suitable content. Simple. Really.
Wendy said, “It is really pretty easy to get accreditation. As long as you can show that it is intended as a training session, that it targets planners with at least two years experience, and it is not a commercial for a product or service … you are good to go.”
Wendy isn’t employed by a governmental entity, but she often works for one. She is a senior planner with McBride Dale Clarion (MDC, the first two words reference the Cincinnati office’s two principals), a private consulting firm, which is one of seven offices of Clarion Assoc., “a national land-use and real-estate consulting firm, [which] provides clients with a powerful team of professionals whose experience ranges from landscape architecture to law, from real-estate appraisal to urban design, from environmental assessment to community planning,” according to its website, www.clarionassociates.com.
Wendy also serves as president of the APA’s Ohio chapter, and she was one of a handful of planners who attended last year’s National Signage Research & Education Conference. Within her office’s six-planner staff, she writes and revises sign codes the most. She received a bachelor’s degree in urban planning from the University of Cincinnati, but confesses she believes virtually all training that planners receive about signage is gathered on the job.
Wendy explained that MDC often plays on both sides of the fence. The firm might serve as an expert witness for a community whose sign code has been challenged. Conversely, MDC might represent a national chain and argue for a sign permit and/or a variance. And, in these cash-strapped times, some communities are beginning to eliminate their planning departments in favor of outsourcing it to companies like MDC.
Wendy agrees, as diverse as these areas can be, so, too, is the diversity of community attitudes toward signs. Lack of standardization clearly hampers local sign codes. Most communities have their own visions for signs, but don’t really know how to embody their ideas in regulations. Subjectivity reigns, and regulations can easily become unintelligibly vague.
“I find my role is often one of facilitator, someone who can provide examples from my national experiences, and information to the community, to help it make better decisions,” Wendy explained.
Fortunately, that bastion of blatant personal preference, the design review board, seems to waning in popularity, “particularly as communities have begun incorporating more objective sign standards that are easily enforced by staff,” she added.
Also, Wendy sees more end users taking an interest in local sign codes. As contributors to the tax base, their input achieves greater credence, whereas she doubts that increased presence of sign companies at any hearings would make as significant a difference. Their conspicuous agendas often preclude meaningful face time.
I was disappointed when Wendy only offered Street Graphics when I asked her if she utilized any sign-related references, similarly to the way I was disheartened that the Framework for On-Premise Sign Regulations cites the sequel, Street Graphics and the Law, as one of its only two sources in its appendix. Clearly, sign-industry research has achieved negligible influence in the planning and zoning realm.
A few times, Wendy was already smiling before I was halfway done relaying an impression. I said, “In most orga¬nizations, the rational, stable people tend to be in charge, and the radicals reside more on the fringe. But . . .” She already knew I was referencing the APA, and she diplomatically replied that most of the state APA chapters believed they are much more in touch with their constituents than the national group, “in part because of the local attitudes toward things like signage that vary greatly across the nation,” she said.
Wendy concluded, “A highly effective means of helping train planners about signage is participating in the conferences and submitting articles that planners receive [for AICP and non-AICP planners alike] and by taking a more balanced approach – presentations and discussions held in collaboration with planners or communities – that can illustrate all sides of a story, all with a calming sense of reason.”