Sign ordinance should be repealed
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Editor,
The Lake County Sign Ordinance was adopted around 1995 while I was a Lake County Commissioner, due to an ever-increasing installation of billboards along US 93 as well as all other primary state highways running through Lake County.
The huge commercial billboards were really drawing significant attention and complaints. The second reason for adoption was because the State of Montana, which by State law has sign regulation authority throughout the state on all primary and secondary highways, refused to regulate those signs within the Flathead Indian Reservation boundaries. So Lake County implemented the ordinance regulating only “off premise” signs, excluding all Indian trust lands. Therefore, numerous signs throughout the county are exempt from the ordinance.
After 10 years of the ordinance’s adoption, Lake County’s enforcement is less than 10 percent of all the billboards in existence. Substantial numbers of billboards are on trust land, therefore exempt from regulations. An ordinance that is not enforced, as well as legally weak and ignored by the public becomes an ordinance that is not needed. I guarantee you that if anyone requested the Commission under the Freedom of Information Act for the inventory of all signs, their locations, the license numbers, who is the license holder, when the sign was installed and authorized, when it is due for renewal, if the sign ownership has been transferred and an accounting of who paid the fees and where it went, they could not produce such information.
I tried to get the commission to repeal the ordinance in 2005 through 2008 — the last four years of my tenure on the Commission — to no avail. The ordinance has not been applied, enforced or complied with to the point of being a “joke” and would not pass muster in a court of law if anyone wanted to put up a billboard tomorrow. The ordinance needs to be repealed.
Mike Hutchin
Polson
