Everyone benefits when our city is beautiful. People want to live here, businesses want to locate here, visitors want to come here and people want to shop here when and where it is beautiful.

Signage is part of our visual environment. The hundreds of signs cluttering the streetscape of Main, University, 13th, 32nd Ave S. make it extremely difficult to find goods and services on those roads through the visual morass of all of that signage. Worse yet, flashing signs at busy intersections can distract drivers and cause accidents.

At present, our city leaders would like to limit the signage that advertisers can use but the sign code industry- a very special interest- has been allowed to hijack our sign code with their argument that they cant make any money unless they get to pollute our visual environment with cheap portable signs, billboards and electric signs. When they do this, our entire city pays the price of a loose sign ordinance. Lets clean up our sign code to allow portable signs for very short windows of time, i.e. 14 days, prohibit billboards in the city limits and prohibit electronic signs within 500' *measured radially* of any residential neighborhood or school. Moreover, lets encourage the use of (non electric) monument signs to level the advertising playing field, and make it much easier for consumers to find stores and services.

Lastly, if you don't like the visual pollution that hundreds of signs make along the arterial roads in our city, write your city commissioner or Fargo's planning department today. Otherwise, control of our city aesthetics will go to the squeaky wheel sign industry.