BEDFORD, N.Y. - Lawn signs, Bedford’s largely unregulated, most often innocuous support of such things as positive values and civic institutions, are about to get official scrutiny.
Early next month, the Town Board is expected to consider a draft local law that would govern lawn signs’ size, number and placement, but not the messages’ content.
Supervisor Ellen Calves, in a July 11 memo to board members, noted that current zoning “provides for temporary signs in the town’s right-of way, but it fails to directly address temporary or removable signs on residential property.”
“We don’t have any rules about them,” she told the board’s July 15 meeting. “So, technically, they’re not really allowed—but we don’t really enforce anything about them.”
The board set Aug. 5, its only scheduled meeting date next month, for further discussion of the issue, one carrying the potential for debate over free speech and property rights.
“I’m sure,” Town Attorney Eric Gordon said, “you’ll get a fair amount of comment on this.”
At issue, Calves said, is whether the town should “put something in the [zoning] code to sort of say what the exception is to our rules about having permits if you want to put up these signs.”
She said the signs that people put up carry messages like “‘We support the police’ or Katonah Fire Department or Healthy Yards.”
At July’s only scheduled Town Board meeting, members looked informally at a proposal that would allow each homeowner two non-illuminated signs. They could be up to 6 square feet each and placed no closer than 10 feet from a neighbor’s lot line.
Councilwoman Bobbi Bittker noted that some homeowners, with minimal front lawns, could face difficulties in meeting side-yard separation limits. At the same time, she asked of multiacre homesteads—not uncommon in Bedford—“Are we going to tell them you can only put two small signs out? . . . How do we address that?”
Councilman Andres Castillo called the proposal “a compromise between two competing priorities. I feel very strongly that our residents should be able to express themselves in this way but at the same time not at the expense of the aesthetics of the neighborhood.”
The current zoning code regulates messages posted in town rights-of way but does not require permits for them. Such signs include roadside announcements, say, of an upcoming event, a candidate’s political poster, directions to a yard sale. “They don’t need a permit,” the supervisor said, “but they have to follow those [zoning] rules. Pretty much any other sign requires a permit anywhere, unless there’s an exception.”
In her memo to the board, Calves said she had asked summer intern Katherine Corsello of Katonah to develop the proposal discussed at the July 15 meeting. It was meant, Calves wrote, “to amend the local law to allow residents to display removable signs and display real estate signs in residential zoning districts on property used for residential uses (located outside of the right-of-way) in a way that is appropriate for neighborhoods and consistent with the Town’s Comprehensive Plan.”
Neighbors’ objections have put the brakes on town plans for stop signs at Payne Avenue but paved the way for stop signs at two other Babbitt Road intersections in Bedford Hills.
Stop signs at Franklin and Payne avenues and Glen Road had been requested by some residents. But others at a July 15 public hearing called for changes in the specific sign allocations and maintained that stricter enforcement of parking restrictions could better address visibility issues.
Rather than adopt a local law authorizing the original sign proposals, the board voted to test the residents’ recommended changes in a pilot program then assess them in November.
At that point, Supervisor Ellen Calves said in an interview, “we will decide whether to move forward with a different pilot or pass a local law making [the suggested changes] the law of the land.”
The Town Board set an Aug. 5 public hearing on yet another six-month extension of Bedford’s freeze on applications for large-scale battery installations.
Battery energy-storage systems, or BESS, are critical in building renewable-energy systems. But since they are also potentially hazardous, the board imposed a six-month freeze on new installations last August, renewed the ban in February and likely will again after next month’s community input.
A task force is looking to draft a Bedford local law regulating large-scale storage-batteries in the town.
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