Baltimore County's citizen sign crusader is on the case.
Rolling down Eastern Boulevard in his 1994 Volvo, Mike Pierce swings into the parking lot next to Essex Liquors to point out the latest turn in one of his continuing battles against visual clutter. Orange paint had been used weeks ago to cover offending signs painted on the wall, but the wall has since sprouted many signs printed on rectangular plastic sheets: Yuengling, Pabst, Bud Light, Corona, Smirnoff.
"The code says 'paper or soft material,' " says Pierce, who settled in Baltimore County when he moved to Maryland in 1995, and now lives in Kingsville. "We're talking about Coroplast … corrugated plastic. To me, these are not legal."
He has already taken pictures, preparing for a next step in the case, one of many he has launched in about five years of patrolling the county armed with a combination still picture/video camera, a stopwatch for timing changeable electronic signs and expert knowledge of local zoning rules. Pierce — the county's reigning champion of sign complainants — is responsible for a third of 115 current case files on nonpolitical signs opened by the county's department of Permits and Development Management.
"He keeps us busy," says the department director, Timothy M. Kotroco.
His department's 20 inspectors act on alleged sign offenses only in response to complaints from residents like Pierce, although no one else at the moment approaches his sign code vigilance. Kotroco says Pierce is well-known in the department, and he applauds the pursuit of what he calls a "noble cause."
With the onset of political season, Kotroco's department has been chasing many complaints about campaign signs, although the rules governing those signs are now hung up in federal court. Pierce, however, prefers to avoid politics. He finds plenty of targets amid the county's forest of commercial advertising: banners; pennants; balloons; sidewalk sandwich boards; serpentine tube figures dancing on air; roadside real estate ads mushrooming overnight; and electronic signs changing too quickly.
Pierce says he's driven by an impulse to bring order out of disorder.
"It's like spam e-mail, it's litter, it's clutter," says Pierce. "This is the blight, the clutter stuff thrown in our faces unnecessarily."
One bad sign is one thing, he says. But put a bunch of them one after another on a strip, especially the electronic signs flashing different messages every few seconds, and pretty soon "it starts to look like Las Vegas."
Pierce, 63, was born in Minnesota and has moved around a bit during a career in telecommunications, working most recently for a defense contractor in Virginia. He's now unemployed but expects to be working again soon as demand picks up near Aberdeen Proving Ground for his specialty: writing specifications for telecommunications equipment.
He's a man of details. This spring, in pursuit of a sign complaint on Pulaski Highway, Pierce looked up the property deed, then measured the ground to support his claim that a sign mounted on a wooden frame announcing the opening of a hair salon was in the highway right of way, not on private land. Kotroco figures Pierce probably knows the sign code — 34 pages in Baltimore County's zoning regulations, including appendices — about as well as anyone. Pierce says he knows its quirks and ambiguities, and has followed the code through a major overhaul in 1997 and later revisions.
He was particularly irked by a bill governing electronic flashing signs adopted by the County Council in 2008. At that time, there was no clear rule on how frequently the signs could change their message. Every hour? Every 15 minutes?
After months of study and hearings, the planning board recommended that such signs not change their message more than once an hour. As introduced in the council, the cycle was cut to 30 minutes. The rationale for a longer cycle is that the more often the roadside signs change, the more distracting they can be to passing drivers, increasing the potential traffic hazard.
Pierce said he'd have been happy with 30 minutes, but in the midst of council discussion, the proposed timing was radically amended to 15 seconds. That reduced the cycle 120-fold.
"There were audible gasps in the audience," Pierce recalls. Nonetheless, the measure passed by a vote of 4-3.
"I thought we were going to get a limit of 30 minutes," says Pierce. "That's why I've been so adamant."
As soon as the new law went into effect in mid-2009, Pierce started his vigil. That July, he filed a complaint claiming electronic sign violations at 21 locations on York Road in Towson, Timonium and Cockeysville. He has filed 13 more complaints this year for electronic signs along Liberty, Reisterstown, Belair, and Compass roads and Eastern Boulevard.
Essex Liquors is high on his list. Its two-sided electronic sign changes constantly, apparently violating not only the time cycle, but rules barring moving images and scrolling: "OPEN 9AM-12AM ... SALE … WINES SPECIAL … BUD ICE 30PK $14.99."
"This is probably one of the worst in the county," says Pierce, adding that he filed a complaint about it a year ago. He has a video of it, and he plans to bring it to a hearing Aug. 4.
The store owner, Sukhvir Singh, says the sign is built for one time cycle and it cannot be adjusted. Asked about shutting it off entirely, he says, "I spent a whole lot of money on that sign," and it was approved by the county years ago. He said he has never heard of Mike Pierce, but he knows someone has been taking pictures of his store.
"I don't know what this guy wants from me," Singh says.
Even though his name and phone number are all over so many sign complaints, Pierce says he has rarely heard from the people he has turned in. He recalls getting a call years ago from one business owner, a car dealer on Belair Road who said he thought Pierce was a disgruntled former customer. One manager of a Verizon store on Belair Road said she was grateful when Pierce stopped in to ask about a banner tied to the railing of the property the store was leasing. The manager didn't know what to do about the sign.
"She said, 'I'll do anything to get rid of that stupid sign,' " Pierce recalls.
The large banner outside of that store had advertised "Psychic and Tarot Readings," available at another location up the street. Somehow, they didn't see the county's chief sign scold coming.
Baltimore County sign rule highlights
•The message on an electronic sign may not change more than once every 15 seconds.
•Political signs are not allowed to be larger than 8 square feet in residential areas, and may not exceed 50 square feet in business and industrial zones. (This rule is being challenged in court.)
•No sign larger than 8 square feet may be within 100 feet of another sign of that size on a single premises.
•Real estate signs must be taken down within a week of the sale or leasing of the advertised property.
•Signs may not be placed in a street and are not allowed to obstruct traffic or road signals.