As a city, we need to work at keeping our businesses, encourage their expansion, and encourage upgrades. We need to keep businesses informed of changes that are coming.

One Response to “Helping Our Businesses”

  1. 10:22 am, 20 July, 2009 р.
    DonnaS says:

    The city needs to start working with businesses when it makes changes in ordinances that affect businesses. This is very evident in the LED sign ordinance that they put into place last year. They have changed it once and now they have put a moratorium on all LED signs. See agenda from July 13th meeting of the Columbia Heights City Council.

    http://docs.ci.columbia-heights.mn.us/weblink7/DocView.aspx?id=355882

    This city had a ban on all LED signs until they wanted to add LED to their new liquor store sign. Now that this has been approved for the city liquor store they are looking at changing this again! But instead of consulting with businesses that this would affect, they are just going about changing things without opening up a dialog with current businesses. There are new and old businesses that are in need of signs and now we are re-writing laws before the last ordinance change has even had time to let the ink dry! If an open and public discussion had been brought up with these businesses before this had happened, we might not have had to re-look at this so soon after the last change was made.

    When I brought up the need of a new sign to inform people about community events, the city manager commented that they are looking at this. Then he went on to mention that he really liked the one that St. Anthony has. That is very interesting, since that type of sign is not allowed in Columbia Heights! This city does not allow an LED sign that changes more than once every 10 minutes. Now the city has to change the law again in order to get what they want!

    I’m not saying that this would necessarily be a bad thing to change the signage ordinance. What I am trying to point out that if those businesses that would be interested in this type of sign had been consulted originally, we would not have to continue to re-writing this ordinance. Now it looks like we are changing this ordinance to benefit one party-the city. That is illegal.

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