OXNARD : City Launches Fight on Illegal Signs

Oxnard officials today will launch a citywide campaign to rid roadsides and walkways of thousands of bootleg signs erected on the weekends to direct home buyers to new housing tracts.

After months of planning, Paul H. Brown Advertising of Westlake Village on Thursday unveiled the new program, which will group together directional signs on single billboards 6 feet tall by 2 feet wide.

The advertising agency will place 36 of the billboards at strategic locations throughout the city. The billboards will be taken down each weekend.

“The weekend directionals work so well and are so cheap that it is difficult for the city to stem the tide,” said Paul Brown of the smaller roadside signs. “But we think we’ve come up with a program that works better and looks much nicer.”

At the heart of the new campaign will be stepped-up enforcement of city codes outlawing the smaller directional signs that spring up by the thousands in Oxnard each weekend.

Home builders who continue to erect the roadside placards will have them removed and could face fines, Community Development Director Richard Maggio said.

“They have already been informed,” Maggio said of the city’s new home builders. “It’s not going to be a surprise to anybody.”

Last year, homeowners began complaining about the proliferation of illegal signs.

At one time, individual developers were erecting as many as 600 signs on a given weekend. City planners reduced that number by fixing a cap of 50 signs per developer. Still, thousands are planted each weekend.

Some home builders think that the new program is a necessary step in ending the proliferation of roadside signs.

“I think it should accomplish the same thing with less confusion,” said Karen Van Winkle, marketing manager for Standard Pacific of Ventura, developer of the Summerfield and San Miguel tracts.