There I was Tuesday, beating the newspaper against my head after reading this:

The city’s Planning & Growth Management Department believes [Golden Corral’s] proposed sign is too big, much more so than what is allowed in the city ordinance. Proposals have the sign at 40-foot, 215-square-feet tall [sic]. The city requires 25-foot-tall, 70-square-foot signs for businesses such as Golden Corral […]

Russ Hruby of RJH Management Corp. said the company is willing to meet whatever restrictions are decided upon by the zoning commission or City Council. […]

[Second District City Councilwoman Barbara Van Auken says,] “We’re going to work with them and give them as close to the size as they want,” she said. “That area is a little unique in that way that there is a lot of big signs on University. While we like to get signs smaller, we have to be realistic. As new businesses locate there, they have big signs to compete with.”

Think about that for a minute and let it sink in:

Here’s a developer who is locating on University Street between War Memorial Drive and Forrest Hill — a stretch of road that is the epitome of poor urban design, and probably the most often-cited example of visual clutter in the City. Presumably, city officials would like to see the area improved and would jump at the opportunity to start scaling down the signs to bring them in line with the sign ordinance.

And it gets better! The developer says he’s “willing to meet whatever restrictions are decided upon by the zoning commission or City Council” — unlike Westlake Shopping Center which intimidated the City Council into giving it a big ordinance-busting sign by claiming its then-secret tenant (later revealed to be Fresh Market) would not locate there if they couldn’t have a humongous sign. No, this developer is very happy with the City, and doesn’t perceive the city as unfriendly to business. In fact, he’s quoted as saying, “It’s not an adversarial position at all…. Peoria has been (accommodating).”

What an opportunity! No threats, no intimidation. A new business on University street willing to abide by the code! Could this be the start of cleaning up University and reducing visual clutter? Could this business’s sign compliance be used as a shining, positive example for other businesses who locate there in the future?

Enter Barbara Van Auken, Second District Council Representative.

“We’re going to work with them and give them as close to the size as they want,” she said [emphasis mine]. What? Why in the world would you want to do that? “That area is a little unique in that way that there is a lot of big signs on University….” Hmmm, “unique” is one word for it; “ugly” is another. “Blighted” fits the bill, too.

“While we like to get signs smaller, we have to be realistic. As new businesses locate there, they have big signs to compete with.” I’m not sure whether this is doublespeak or just plain self-contradiction. If Councilwoman Van Auken really would “like to get signs smaller,” then she logically would not “give them as close to the size as they want,” which is three times the size allowed by ordinance and twice as big as the McDonald’s sign across the street, especially after the developer has already stated for the record that he’s “willing to meet whatever restrictions are decided.”

So the bottom line is that signs will continue to escalate in size along University, unless the rest of the council does the right thing and upholds the sign ordinance. The unwritten rule on the council is that you always vote for what the district council member wants for a project in his or her district. That’s a poor policy in general, and one that definitely should be disregarded in this case.

For those of you who like visuals, I drew this in Google Sketch-Up to show you a comparison of the maximum sign allowed by ordinance (on the left) versus the size of the sign requested by Golden Corral (on the right). These are to scale. Note also the size of an average human at the bottom: