Lyle Cheadle at tonight's City Council Meeting

Two interesting aspects of the Killeen sign ordinance  -- I would call them bugs -- came out at tonight's City Council meeting.

In one, First Baptist Church had to come before the council to request a zoning change in order to legally install an electronic message sign; the ordinance clearly did not intend to restrict churches and schools from erecting signs, but that's exactly what it currently does.  This one is an easy fix, although it's too bad that FBC had to jump through hoops.

In the second, Lyle Cheadle, owner of Guns Galore, protested unequal application of the sign ordinance.  He alleges the sign law says that if a business previously had a city permit for a sign, the sign can remain even if it is in violation of the current sign ordinance.  As a practical matter, only large businesses (or maybe it was businesses with large signs) were required to get such permits before last year; small businesses, such as Guns Galore, were not required to secure permits before erecting signs.  The result is the the large businesses' signs are grandfathered, and small businesses' signs are in violation of the ordinance.

If Dr. Cheadle's summary is accurate, it does seem that the small businesses he references were treated unequally.   You could argue that the city gave them a de facto license by not requiring them to secure any license at all.  This will be difficult to remedy, because it is just those unattractive, unlicensed signs that drove enactment of the sign ordinance in the first place.  If I follow Cheadle's argument to its logical conclusion, the small-business signs that should be grandfathered are those that, if the owners had applied for license, it would have been approved.  And that's impossible to determine. I guess I'd rather live with ugly than be unfair to anyone, but there must be a compromise somewhere.