By Jordan Studer
jstuder@wbcowqel.com

During what Bucyrus City Council President Sis Love called the “world’s shortest public meeting,” a new ordinance governing signs in Bucyrus was discussed Tuesday.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the amendments being considered for the Sign Code in the Bucyrus City Zoning Ordinance per the request of the Bucyrus City Council Platting Committee. The beginning of this process began over a year ago when attorney Michael Bear addressed the Bucyrus City Council about the issue of campaign signs in Crawford County.

“We’ve put a lot of work into this, I’ve been happy,” said Bear, a member of the ad hoc committee. “I was originally looking at one issue with regard to the political science, but I think it’s worked out to fix a number of issues. I think it’s an improvement.”

During a meeting this past Tuesday evening, Zoning Administrator John Rostash explained the amendments and what exactly was to be added or changed.

“Our goal was to make it an enforceable code that is clear, that is considerate of the needs of our business community, and that is easy to understand by everybody,” Rostash said. “We wanted a code that was more useable and enforceable…What we are concerned about are the conditions of the signs, are they placed correctly, and the size of the signs. We took into consideration how local businesses, their marketing has change over the years, to provide for the new signs that are out there and available.”

Rostash also mentioned his appreciation to the ad hoc committee. He said that they, “worked very hard on going through the entire sign code and they came up with these changes that cleaned up a lot of items in the code that were not very objective and virtually unenforceable.”

Following the public meeting, a special Platting Committee meeting was to accept the amendments to the Sign Code of the Bucyrus Zoning Ordinance.

When discussing the amendments further, Love mentioned, “I think that we gave due diligence to all of this. We spent basically one meeting on each section as we were discussing these.”

The amendments were then voted on and accepted to the Sign Code of the Bucyrus City Zoning Ordinance and legislation was requested to be approved by the full city Council.