NORTHAMPTON — Following a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that messages written on signs are protected as free speech, the City Council, after years of review, has created new regulations on the display of signs in the city.
After councilors spent more than an hour deliberating over details, weighing businesses’ freedom to advertise over potential nuisance caused by illuminated signage, the council voted on Oct. 1 to limit the number of ground signs a business can display to six and to require illuminated signs to turn off at 11 p.m.
The ordinance categorizes signs by size, type and location. It allows residents, for instance, to keep political lawn signs on their property for as long as they choose. Prior to the ordinance’s passing, signs were treated differently depending on their purpose, with political signs and signs advertising “products or services” governed by different rules.
“There were a few sections of the [city’s sign] code that were content-based, and those are the items of concern,” Planning and Sustainability Director Carolyn Misch said. “There have always been regulations about signs, and particularly, there used to be a division … between commercial speech and non-commercial speech.”
The overhaul stems from the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, which found that content-based sign regulations violate the First Amendment. The city’s Ordinance Review Committee has been working on new regulations for years.
Thursday’s City Council meeting followed a joint hearing between the Planning Board and the council’s Committee on Legislative Matters the week prior, in which At-Large City Councilor Garrick Perry urged his fellow councilors to include looser restrictions for businesses to promote a more vibrant downtown. However, Perry recused himself from voting at the full council meeting.
Much of the joint committee’s discussion centered around a turn-off time for illuminated signage, with many agreeing that turn-off times should be relative to a business’s closing time, rather than an across-the-board 11 p.m. time restriction.
Ward 1 City Councilor Gwen Nabad, at the full council meeting, said she questioned whether the sign shut-off regulation would blend with the city’s light pollution ordinance, to which Misch responded that the city’s lighting ordinance and the state’s “Dark Skies” bill would supersede the signage ordinance.
“We do have the lighting ordinance that governs signs, and these two sections refer back to each other. There were some comments from people who are advocates for Dark Skies, who were suggesting that there are no limits in residential districts,” Misch said. “Even signs in residential districts have a time-off, and we have specificity about the dynamic sign lighting being dimmed now.”
Ward 3 Councilor Laurie Loisel spoke in favor of businesses being allowed to turn off their signs at closing, rather than at 11 p.m., noting that the city’s downtown businesses are a “fragile ecosystem” that she does not want to hinder with added regulation.
“Our businesses are fragile, and I’d like to give them some trust — I don’t see why they can’t turn off their lights when they close,” Loisel said. “It just seems like another hoop that our fragile ecosystem downtown [must jump through].”
Nabad echoed Loisel’s concerns about the health of local businesses, noting that bars and other late-night businesses should be allowed to keep signs advertising that they are open.
Others, such as At-Large City Councilor Meg Robbins and Ward 6 City Councilor Christopher Stratton voiced concerns about light trespass from signs that are left on past 11 p.m. being a potential nuisance to nearby residents.
“I would need more information about the light trespass and whether these are going to be feel perceptibly bright to someone seeing them outside their second floor window from across the street or something before I could support later than 11 p.m.,” Stratton said. “I don’t think that 11 p.m. is a beautiful compromise for that concern, but at least it is a compromise for it.”
City Council Vice President Deborah Klemer also argued that a lighting shut-off time an hour after closing would be difficult for police to enforce. She echoed the concerns of former Ward 1 City Councilor Stan Moulton, who was involved in the original charge to revisit the ordinance, that it must be easily enforceable.
“So much work went into this, and I am here first to thank you for having this hearing on the ordinance … I would urge you to continue pushing this forward. Inevitably, there will be some tweaking to it, and that’s great,” Moulton previously said during a public comment session. “While I believe that we have accomplished the mission of removing content-based criteria, we didn’t do anything to create new enforcement mechanisms … as you consider tweaking it, please make sure that it’s practically enforceable.”
