High light

The Reno City Planning Commission last week approved a seven-story sign for Summit Sierra mall and rejected a second such sign.

Scenic Nevada, which as Citizens for a Scenic Reno won a 2000 voter-approved enactment of a ban on new billboards in Reno, said the Summit signs are billboards and should be disallowed.

“This sign is not a billboard. … It is not governed by the city’s digital billboard ordinance,” said Summit lawyer John Frankovich.

The two signs are a little more than 70 feet high and stand on concrete pedestals. They are akin to signs adjacent to the freeways that pass the Sparks Nugget and the Grand Sierra Resort in Reno. One of them has a digital screen, and that one was rejected by the commission.

Frankovich said up to five billboards are allowed in the area, which Summit has agreed to forgo if its two monolithic signs are allowed, a proposition that Scenic Nevada spokespeople called a threat.

“If we don’t give them what they want, they’re going to make it worse,” said Scenic Nevada lawyer Mark Wray.

Scenic Nevada members were already doing a slow burn when they arrived at the meeting. They believed they had the battle won at a Dec. 4 meeting, whereupon Summit was given a continuance.

“When there’s a tie vote, the applicant gets [an extension] and there’s a later date,” said Scenic Nevada board member Peter Neumann. He also told the planning commission members that “the staff [was] meeting behind your back” to work out a deal with Summit.

There were times during the meeting when staffers seemed to come to the aid of Summit, although whether it was advocacy or just keeping the commissioners informed is a subjective call. Frequently, it came when there were differences over definitions. For instance, at one point the issue was raised whether the change on the digital face of the sign from one image to another constituted a “flashing” sign, and a staffer said that it has not normally been defined that way. She said that “flipping from one scene to another every ten seconds” does not flash, and to demonstrate it, she had a Summit representative switch images on a computer that was putting material on wall screens.

Commissioner Douglas Coffman argued that because the technology is advanced, that made it “progressive technology. I think it’s where signage is going. … It’s not as offensive to me.”

Frankovich similarly argued that “the digital is new technology … safer and more effective.” But he also made the case that there’s nothing wrong with relatively obtrusive signs in that particular region, because that’s the way it is expected to go. In fact, he pointed out, there is a casino hotel approved for the area, which is true, though it is a fairly stale approval that has never moved much beyond the approval stage.

Wray responded, characterizing Frankovich’s pitch as “There’s going to be all kinds of crappy signs, so what difference does it make if we have them, too?”

Summit was seeking approval to bend the city’s rules on signs dealing with height, the size of the sign’s face, the number of lights in the sign, and the “variables”—that is, the number or frequency of times the image on the sign changes.

The opponents took repeated shots at the height of the sign, often calling it “seven stories tall” and arguing it could be “seen for miles.” That was a sore spot because there were comments from the commissioners about signs at the Grand Sierra Resort that can be seen for long distances. Commissioner Paul Olivas called the GSR sign the “most obnoxious” in the valley. No one seemed to want to approve another sign that incurred the same level of public displeasure.

“These are very bright signs,” Neumann said in his testimony. “They have more than a million lights—LED lights—in them.”

“There are “no moving parts, no flashing,” Frankovich said. “The change [of images] is not a flash.” In addition, they are adjacent to the freeway, intended to be seen by freeway drivers—“You’ve got to go 40 feet before you reach the level of the freeway.”

Olivas also said the commissioners must follow existing standards for signage.

“We’re not here to write the rules, but we’re here to apply them,” he said—though he also referred to “holes and inconsistencies” in the rules.

Wray told the commissioners, “If this was OK … then he [Frankovich] wouldn’t be coming before you for permission to bend the rules. … They’re making a mockery of the standards you’re supposed to be following.”

Frankovich interpreted the silence of people who live in the area as consent to the signs.

“There is nobody from the surrounding neighborhoods that has come to complain,” he said.

The proposed signs are on-premise, meaning they advertise merchants on the same property where the sign is located. South Reno resident Barbara Rainey was not impressed by that line of argument.

“A hundred percent of the impact of this sign is off premise,” she said.

A study done at the request of Scenic Nevada by state highway officials was invoked against the Summit signs, prompting Frankovich to trivialize the study. That made Commissioner Peter Gower say there is “useful information in it, and I thought it was fairly compelling.”

The meeting was held Dec. 11. Scenic Nevada board member Lori Wray informed the meeting that just the evening before, the Reno City Council had agreed to a moratorium on on-premise digital billboards. “Approving this may be premature,” she said.

The moratorium is on non-casino and non-mall applications.

After the commissioners voted down the digital sign and approved the non-digital version, there were some defenses of the city staffers as having acted “in good faith.”

The buck does not stop with the commission. The Reno City Council has final say on whether to approve the signs, so Scenic Nevada will have to continue gthe effort. The group sent a Dec. 16 notice to its members, telling them, “The planning commission’s decision is final unless appealed by December 22 to the Reno City Council.”

That prompted another community activist write to her mailing list: “As one businessman remarked to members of the city council last week, it is like the wild west here. We need to clean this up. We need to speak out against allowing this visual pollution to destroy our communities and region.”

Mark Wray said later that Scenic Nevada is not in the habit of fighting every eyesore that comes along. “We don’t fight a lot of things,” he said.