LANSDALE – It’s still up to the borough’s zoning hearing board, but Lansdale Borough Council has come out in support of a new electronic message sign at Lansdale Catholic High School.
On Wednesday night council voted unanimously to support one of the two legal arguments that LC plans to make before the zoning board next month.
‘Lansdale Catholic is part of the Lansdale family, and they showed that to all of Lansdale when they chose to stay in Lansdale rather than move to another community,’ said councilman Jack Hansen.
Hansen chairs council’s Code Enforcement and Land Planning committee, which put forward a motion Wednesday night expressing council’s support of the LC application to the zoning board on one of the two legal arguments that LC and its representatives have expressed.
Borough code currently prohibits new installations of electronic variable message signs such as the one LC would like to install. In applying to the zoning board LC made two separate legal arguments: that the sign could be allowed if the zoning board grants a variance to current code, and that their interpretation of the current code would allow their sign by-right based on the definition of ‘changeable message,’ because LC would plan to only change their message every few weeks instead of multiple times per minute.
Borough council discussed the matter in a roughly half-hour executive session at the start of Wednesday night’s meeting, before announcing that borough and LC legal teams worked out an agreement whereby LC would drop the interpretation argument and borough council would express its support for the variance argument.
‘The only thing Lansdale Catholic High School is interested in is having the sign application approved. If it’s done by variance, we’d be more than happy with that as opposed to it being done by interpretation,’ said attorney Frank Bartle, representing LC.
Once the zoning board makes its decision, LC has estimated that the sign could be up within four to six weeks – Bartle said the only holdup could be a third party challenge to the application but he ‘doesn’t anticipate’ one.
Hansen added that not only would LC benefit by being able to change the sign’s message more often and in all weather, the borough and its residents would also benefit from having the sign in place, since LC has agreed to post emergency information such as Amber Alerts or road problems.
‘Last year we had a tree take down a power line on Cannon Avenue, and we could’ve put onto sign like this that people should use 7th Street’ and detour away from Cannon while the line was repaired, Hansen said.
‘That way our first responders would have had less traffic to deal with, and could have been more able to focus on keeping our residents safe,’ he said.
LC’s application is scheduled to be heard before the zoning hearing board when that body meets at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 16, and Hansen said council’s Code committee could begin discussing possible changes to the definition of ‘variable message’ when it next meets at 8 p.m. on Oct. 3.
Both meetings will be held in Borough Hall, located at 1 Vine Street. For more information or an agenda visit www.Lansdale.org or follow @LansdalePA on Twitter.
Follow staff writer Dan Sokil on Twitter @DanSokil.
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