Fewer billboards and shorter business signs are in Layton's future if the City Council goes along with a proposed sign-regulation ordinance.
Layton has had a moratorium on billboards in effect since Nov. 30.City Manager Alex Jensen said the city counted billboards after Thanksgiving and found 38 in Layton - the proposed maximum number. The proposal also allows existing billboards to be relocated where zoning permits.
"We're here to limit, not abolish, billboards," Mayor Jerry Stevenson told concerned billboard owners at a work meeting this week.
The council doesn't want a lot of billboards cluttering up the city -especially when billboards usually advertise things outside the city limits. Jensen said of the 76 billboard faces currently in use, only 16 advertise Layton businesses.
"I don't see us cluttering up the city with signs," Dick Saunders of Saunders Outdoor Advertising said.
Billboard companies fear they may be zoned out of many areas in the future and find themselves losing billboards by attrition.
In addition, other changes also put the south gate area to Hill Air Force Base and all of Highway 89 off limits to billboards.
Spencer Young, a Layton car dealer, said he just finished a comprehensive customer survey that revealed billboards were his second most effective form of advertising - barely behind TV.
For on-site business signs, all existing signs are exempt from new height restrictions, unless they are destroyed by disasters such as winds or a business switches uses. Otherwise new signs could be no higher than 45 feet in the city's commercial corridor and 35 feet elsewhere.