After three months of threatening a Purcellville couple with criminal prosecution (one count each of trespass and larceny) for having removed illegal signs from the public roadways, Loudoun’s fearless crime-fighting very Republican commonwealth’s attorney Jim Plowman has dropped the charges. Continue reading
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What's REALLY going on in politics in Loudoun County, Virginia
Tag Archives: illegal signs
Illegal sign self-help
As noted yesterday, there is a provision in Virginia law that allows citizens to force the courts to act against perpetrators of public nuisances when their local county prosecutor is, just for example, a corrupt partisan hack.
Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Jim Plowman has made clear not only that he has no intention of enforcing the law against illegal advertising signs posted on the public rights of way, but has now taken the truly outrageous step of bringing criminal charges against a Purcellville couple who did nothing more than their civic duty of picking up this trash from the roadside. Continue reading
Plowman sides with the crooks
Ever since sweeping into office in January, our fearless all-Republican Board of Supervisors made it clear they had no interest in enforcing the law that prohibits the posting of advertising signs on roadsides. Now the Blue Ridge Leader reports that our local GOP bosses have taken their “business friendly” policy one step further—by filing criminal charges against a Purcellville couple for removing illegal signs from the public right of way on East Main Street. Continue reading
Still MORE stupid sign tricks
Tomorrow our fearless Board is scheduled to take up the various brilliant schemes that Supervisor Suzanne Volpe (R-Algonkian) et al. have devised to pretend to be doing something about the epidemic of illegal signs littering our roadways.
Since abolishing the extremely effective volunteer clean-up program promptly upon taking office in January as (a) a payoff to the developers who put them in office and (b) payback to those who opposed them, the new Board has been scrambling to cover its collective posterior with all sorts of half-baked schemes that will give the illusion of enforcing the law against illegal signs, while doing almost nothing in reality. Continue reading
Board hails failure as success in sign cleanup effort
As one of its very first gifts to the real estate development industry that put them in office, the all-Republican Loudoun Board of Supervisors voted back in January to eliminate the very successful volunteer program that had been cleaning up illegal signs along Loudoun’s roadsides.
A small sample of the fruits of the board's Keep Loudoun Ugly campaign.
At that time, Ken “Ken” Reid (R-Leesburg) provided a classic Orwellian rationale for the board’s action: he explained that the very success of the program was its failure—since the 50,000 illegal signs the volunteers had cleaned up had added to the stream of paper, wood, and “paint chemicals” choking the county landfill.
In place of the 100 or so volunteers who were able to attack the problem all across the county and do so on weekends when the developers blanket the roadsides with hundreds of their illegal eyesores, the new “program” the board adopted to replace it consists of a single county employee who devotes one weekday a week (with a break for lunch).
Having defined success as failure, it’s probably no surprise that Ken’s fellow board members have now added the nicely symmetrical argument that failure is success.
County staff reported to the board’s land use committee last week that the new sign cleanup effort had so far bagged a mere 300 signs, versus 1,800 collected under the volunteer program during the same period last year. Continue reading
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