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FCPG endorses community gateway sign

Joe Naiman

Village News Reporter

The Fallbrook Community Planning Group will be providing written support for a community gateway sign, which could be two signs consisting of one on each end of the village area.

The planning group voted 14-0 March 21, with Anna Strahan not present, to prepare a letter to the County of San Diego in support of the gateway sign. Planning group chair Eileen Delaney will sign the letter to the county.

“I think it’s great, and I hope the county approves it so we can have our own gateway signs like cities do,” Delaney said.

On October 5 the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to allocate $92,000 from Supervisor Jim Desmond’s Neighborhood Reinvestment Program budget to fund staff hours and a consultant if necessary to develop a program for community monument signage and to present options to the Board of Supervisors for approval within 180 days. The program will initially be for communities in the Fifth Supervisorial District although it could be expanded to unincorporated communities in other areas. The 180-day period means that the county supervisors will likely consider an ordinance to implement the program in April.

“We want to be ready. We want to have design concepts and location concepts and everything, if possible,” said Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce executive director Lila MacDonald, who gave a presentation at the planning group meeting.

MacDonald asked the planning group for formal support of the gateway arches. “The gateway is something the community’s been talking about for a long time,” she said.

“We started with the banners on Main Street and then we moved to the monument signs and the wayfinding signs,” MacDonald said. “The gateway’s the last part of it.”

The community monument signs Desmond proposed after hearing from representatives of multiple Fifth District communities would be within county road right-of-way and in compliance with the county Zoning Ordinance section regarding community identification signs. The Zoning Ordinance provisions were intended to apply to non-profit or private organizations, but the county would implement and construct community monument signs. The Board of Supervisors would approve monument signs after input from the relevant community planning group or community sponsor group is provided. County staff would prioritize communities which have actively requested and pursued identification signs for their community.

The Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce has paid for the wayfinding signs. Funding for the gateway arches may involve county funding, including Neighborhood Reinvestment Program or Community Enhancement grants from supervisors’ discretionary budgets, or it could utilize non-profit or other private funding. “That would be determined,” MacDonald said. “A lot of those hoops that you have to go through is really the expense.”

The new ordinance would facilitate the non-financial components. “It’s just a really arduous process,” MacDonald said. “They need to have a process by which it’s a lot easier than it is right now.”

Some restrictions of the existing sign ordinance will likely remain. The signs must not obscure a driver's line-of-sight or create a safety hazard for drivers, pedestrians, or bicyclists, and the location must not impact sensitive habitat.

The existing ordinance allows signs to be either single-faced or double-faced. Neither face on a ground-mounted sign can exceed 100 square feet and neither face on a street-spanning sign can exceed 225 square feet. The height of a ground-mounted sign is limited to 20 feet while a street-mounted sign is allowed to be up to 30 feet in height and must have at least 16 feet of clearance between the lowest part of the sign and the highest ground elevation directly below.

The gateway signs may include pillars as well as an arch. The location is to be determined, and the Fallbrook Chamber of Commerce would prefer one gateway arch at the north end of the village portion of Fallbrook and one arch at the south end. “The question would be engineering-wise where is that possible,” MacDonald said.

“We’ll see what happens,” Delaney said.

 

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