By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
YACHATS – People passing by the Yachats Commons now have a high-resolution nod to modernity with the debut Thursday of an electronic reader board.
Safety concerns triggered the upgrade from the old board with its manually-maneuvered individual block letters.
“We will be able to change the wording on the new one from an app on our phones,” said city manager Bobbi Price. “It was really done for staff safety and time, and also event producers’ safety. We had a couple instances where people did get hurt trying to change the reader board sign.”
The reader board and installation cost just over $30,000, with the money coming from the city’s capital improvement budget.
A new bright blue sign was also added in front of city hall to more clearly mark the building because “a lot of people were still going to the Commons thinking it is city hall,” Price said.
Both signs were seemingly small, simple projects discussed by city commissions or councils for years but never tackled until this year.
Price said staff or event managers falling on the sometimes slippery slope at the base of the Commons sign will no longer be an issue and that the reader board now gives the city the ability to pivot from advertising an upcoming event to warning about a traffic closure or emergency.
Changing the lettering on the previous sign was taking “a significant amount of staff time,” Price said, and updating it with real-time emergency notifications wasn’t really an option.
The four-by-eight-foot screen boasts thousands of individual LED lights capable of projecting everything from messages to photos and graphics. The good news for people concerned about possible glare or driver distraction is a promise of prudence.
“It can be dimmed at night so it’s not going to be too bright,” Price said. “And it will have a set message, it could be black and white, or it could have a picture behind it with a message. And the idea is just to have one message at a time and if it changes it would be every 10 minutes or so.”
The new board was approved by city council.
While a city ordinance bans “signs with a dynamic element, including but not limited to video and digital signs,” city planner Katherine Gunether clarified that it is not a ban on such signs but just on any “dynamic” or rapidly moving, distracting elements.
In the event of a power outage, the reader board will be powered by emergency generators or solar panels planned as part of a civic-campus resiliency project.
A digital sign erected by the Sea Note Restaurant & Lounge spurred a review of the city ordinance that was adopted in 2018. The result of that was the lounge’s sign stayed but not its blinking or scrolling “dynamic elements.”
- Garret Jaros is YachatsNews’ full-time reporter and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Well done! Changing the old sign was a scary endeavor for whoever had to do it.
The sign ordinance doesn’t prohibit digital signs. It prohibits digital signs with “dynamic elements”. As long as the sign is operated statically, and doesn’t blink, flash or scroll, then it wont violate the sign ordnance. The Sea Note has had a static digital sign for years. But looping through different messages every ten minutes, however, is a dynamic element and would violate the sign ordinance. Why not just comply with the ordinance and use the sign statically?
This is correct, and I see the piece has been updated with the city planner weighing in on this.
I was on the planning commission that drafted the ordinance and the City Council that approved it. We were intentional about the language here because we expected that someday the City would choose to replace the deteriorating old board with a digital one they could change more easily.
A dynamic element would include any algorithmic change to the geometry or properties of the light emitted from the sign. An algorithm that turns individual lights on and off, changes colors, or loops through multiple messages or graphics is a dynamic element. The ordinance doesn’t distinguish between rapidly moving and slow moving dynamic elements. If it moves, it’s dynamic.
A thoughtful and good move. Even though I still consider myself to be pretty nimble, it was a tough job putting those letters up on that slippery slope and it took a long time and a lot of patience when they didn’t stick the first or third time (lol). Happy we can post multiple events and updates without a lot of flashing – every 10 minutes is pretty static, I think. Thank you.