Those sign spinners you see all over Orlando might be a rarity now in Ocoee.

Ocoee has spun sign-spinners out of town.

Despite a plea from an advertising firm that uses so-called “human signs,” Ocoee city commissioners passed new rules that restrict street-corner marketers who shake and twirl signs to catch the attention of motorists and passers-by.

“There are businesses that really depend on this form of advertising,” said John Dick, owner of GotchaWorks, a Winter Park firm that employs signspinners as one of its advertising techniques.

Human signs have been used by real-estate developers to drive traffic into grand openings for new subdivisions and apartment communities, Dick said Tuesday night. Commissioners OK’d the change anyway by a unanimous vote.

Spinners, some wearing earbuds and showing off flashy moves, usually work at busy street corners and twirl signs that point the way to the businesses paying for their services.

Dick said a Disney-area restaurateur has credited signspinners with reaching the customers who keep him competitive in a crowded market.

“For a lot of businesses, sign spinners are their number one or second-best means of creating customer traffic,” he said. “If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t hire us.”

The new rule doesn’t ban sign spinners as an ordinance in neighboring Winter Garden does, but Ocoee’s measure restricts where sign-spinners can stand and perform, curbing the human ads’ effectiveness.

Now spinners can’t stand on city right-of-way.

“If your goal is to get rid of sign spinners in the city of Ocoee, go ahead and pass this ordinance, and they will go away,” Dick said.

He said the city’s motive for the new rules — to eliminate distractions at intersections for safety reasons — lacked factual basis, as he was unaware of any accident or incident caused by a sign-spinner.

But Commissioner Rosemary Wilsen argued that crowded State Road 50 — where spinners twirl ads for mobile phones, cash-for-gold businesses, mattress outlets and furniture-liquidation sales — “is dangerous to me at this point.”

Dick said sign-spinning also provides jobs. He said his company paid $250,000 last year to part-time twirlers, including high school kids helping their families make ends meet.

“It truly is the difference in making rent,” Dick said of $15-an-hour wages he pays his spinners. “It truly is the difference in making sure the car insurance is paid at the end of the month.”

Mayor Rusty Johnson defended the new rules.

He said it would discourage “the guy with a furniture store in Winter Garden who’s been holding a going-out-of-business sale for four years” from cluttering S.R. 50 in Ocoee with a signspinner to advertise his business because Winter Garden’s rules forbid him from doing it there.

The ordinance calls for police to enforce violations on public property and by city code-enforcement officers on private property. Violators could be fined $100 per infraction.

But sign spinners can still twirl signs on the property where the business or service advertised is located.