Ocoee aims to restrict sign spinner ‘distraction’
Ocoee got tough on street-corner beggars this week and now is taking aim at sidewalk marketers who shake and twirl signs to catch the eyes of motorists and passers-by.
A proposed ordinance would slap new rules on the sign spinners.
“Some of them are pretty good, pretty entertaining,” Mayor Rusty Johnson said. “They stand on the corner, twirlin’ and dancin’ and stuff — you want to stop sometimes and watch, but that’s the problem. They’re a distraction.”
City leaders unveiled the new rule Tuesday night, when commissioners unanimously approved a panhandling ordinance forbidding people from soliciting money at intersections or without prior registration with city police.
That rule, too, was aimed at eliminating distractions and improving safety along Colonial Drive, Silver Star Road and other highvolume thoroughfares where rushhour traffic tends to get snarled, the mayor said.
Officials said a merchant who was liquidating his inventory re-
cently paid someone to hold a sign in Ocoee, directing customers to his going-out-of-business sale 2 miles west in Winter Garden, which does not allow “human signs.”
“That’s what got everybody mad,” Johnson said.
The proposed rules wouldn’t ban sign spinners as neighboring Winter Garden does, but it would tamp down what the ordinance calls “human signs.”
The measure defines a “human sign” as one “continuously held by, spun or attached to a person” while drawing attention to a business, commodity, service or product.
A sign spinner couldn’t twirl a placard in the public right of way or stray far from the business whose products and services the spinner is touting.
Sign spinners often hawk mobile phone businesses, pawn shops that buy gold or open houses at a new apartment complex or residential development.
They typically twirl for a few dollars above the $8.10 minimum wage.
Central Florida has seen its share of traffic-stopping “human signs,” including “Mr. Gold,” Jose Melendez, a sign spinner who donned a gold top hat, mask and suit on East Colonial Drive to lure customers to a store that bought gold.
He was featured in a short documentary by filmmaker Brian Carlson.
Ocoee City Planner Mike Rumer recalled another sign spinner who danced like pop icon Michael Jackson while twirling a sign for Hollywood Puppies, a now-defunct pet store.
Some municipal governments have been dragged into court to defend legislated bans on sign spinners, said Zach Dobosh, Florida manager for AArrow Sign Spinners.
Critics call the proposed restrictions “anti-business” and argue they infringe on constitutionally protected speech and expression.
Dobosh said his company, based in Los Angeles, employs about 2,000 sign spinners worldwide, and many are high-energy teens working their first jobs.
Winter Garden forbids most portable signs as well as arm-flailing tube men and other attention-grabbing marketing devices.
“We’ve chased away Superman and the Statue of Liberty,” Winter Garden City Manager Mike Bollhoefer said of costumed roadside sign wavers, also prohibited by city rules. “They’re tacky, and they pose a distraction to drivers. … In fact, they’re designed to distract drivers.”
But they’re good for business, said Jessica Pollack, who pays an Ocoee High School senior to spin a sign for Sweet Jessie’s, an ice cream shop on Clarke Road.
“At least once every day when she’s out there, someone comes up and says, ‘Hey, we just saw your sign. We didn’t know you were here … We’re so happy you’re here.’ ”
Sweet Jessie’s spinner, Alyssa Acevedo, 18, could keep twirling if the new rule passes because she dances “within the common area” where the shop is situated.
But Ocoee’s spin control might knock out Pedro Luna, who holds a sign advertising deals for Metro PCS six hours a day every day near Health Central.
Luna, 56, said he has been a “human sign” for three years.
“It pays the bills,” he said.