Signage issues plague Scenic Byways project
by Lee Manchester
News Staff Writer, Lake Placid News
Reprinted by permission of the Lake Placid News
LAKE PLACID - A local war has raged since last August over plans to promote the tourism potential of the Olympic Trail Scenic Byway, which runs 170 miles through the Adirondacks from Keeseville to Sackets Harbor.
The latest battle in that war took place at last week’s meeting of the North Elba Town Board, which had previously endorsed the tourism planning process being organized by the Adirondack North Country Association under contract with the state Department of Transportation.
Bringing the battle to Lake Placid was Judy Ford, a former leader in the Adirondack Solidarity Alliance.
Ford, a Clintonville businesswoman, has had her own brush with the state Scenic Byways program. In 1994 she received a letter from the DOT ordering her to remove from the intersection of Rectory Street and Route 9N in Clintonville a sign advertising her upholstery business.
The letter, sent by the DOT’s Property Management Office in Watertown, claimed that Ford’s sign had been erected without a permit on a state highway right of way. It went on to say that a new permit could not be issued for the sign because a federal highway funding law passed in 1991 “contained a provision prohibiting the erection of new signs adjacent to any federally funded highways designated as Scenic Byways.”
States that do not enforce these regulations are subject to losing millions in federal highway funding.
The DOT’s order to Judy Ford was, according to her, all a misunderstanding on the state’s part. A footnote contained in the letter she received noted that “signs placed on an integral part of the activity they advertise are considered on-premise and do not require a permit.” Ford sent the DOT a copy of the deed to her property, showing that she had a deeded right-of-way to the land where she had placed her sign, which stands at the base of the drive leading up to her shop from Route 9N.
According to Tom Blatchford of the DOT’s Watertown office, that satisfied the state.
Since then, Ford and her husband Paul have taken the extra step of actually purchasing outright the strip of land connecting their home and shops with the sign location — just to be sure.
“I don’t mind regulations about the size of signs you can have, or their color, or what you can say on them,” Ford said in her home on Wednesday, “but don’t tell me that I can’t have one.”
Ford’s encounter with the DOT, combined with her experience fighting the Adirondack Park Agency as an Adirondack Solidarity leader, came together when the DOT started sending letters out again about off-premise business signs on designated Scenic Byways, including the portion of the Olympic Trail byway that runs along routes 9N and 86 between Keeseville and Lake Placid.
“We’ve sent out hundreds of such letters over the last couple of years,” Blatchford said, “trying to make people aware of what their legal obligations are.”
The timing of the DOT’s enforcement letter campaign coincided with the beginning of ANCA’s efforts to gather community input for the Olympic Trail tourism promotion plan.
“The Scenic Byways program can do a lot of good for a lot of communities,” Blatchford added, “but it does contain some quite prohibitive sign rules.”
ANCA agrees, according to Executive Director Terry Martino.
It was ANCA’s effort to draw community leaders into the planning process to promote the Olympic Trail’s tourism potential — and the backlash from Adirondack Solidarity — that made Martino aware of what a problem sign regulations really were for small businesses in the Adirondacks.
ANCA is currently working on a program, under contract with the DOT, to develop “wayfinding signage” for the Scenic Byway system. At the same time, the organization is asking for clarification from the state on a number of issues related to signage along roads throughout New York.
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