Post #267: Note a slight change of plans: I’m going to take back your “Small Town Vienna” sign. Please.

Posted on May 8, 2019

Today — the day after the election — starts the period when all the candidates are supposed to go out and pick up their signs.  I am going to start picking up the surviving green “Support Small Town Vienna” signs.

You can keep your sign if you want to, but you’ll have to tell me you want to keep it. I (purposefully) allowed people to get signs anonymously, and I did not ask for an email address.  I have email addresses for some people who got signs, and I will be emailing them shortly.  Otherwise, if you want to KEEP your sign, please enter your name and address in the form below, to let me know that you want to KEEP your sign.

Change of plan.  The sign-pick-up crews are already out.  They’ll probably get your sign.  Let them, and if you sign in below, I’ll bring you back another sign, with new metal legs on.

I WANT TO KEEP MY SIGN!

And if I take your sign, and it turns out that you wanted to keep it, just email me here (savemaple.org@gmail.com) and I will return a sign to you, complete with new metal legs.

Otherwise, if I don’t hear from you, I’m going to take your sign — for now.  I am going to record every address from which I take one of those signs.  Next year, at election time, I will offer to return each sign, refurbished with new legs, to each household who has a sign now. Think of this as sending it back to the shop for a tune-up..

There are three reasons to do this.

One, they have been up so long that they are literally breaking down.   See Post #237 for my offer of new metal legs, as the old ones have started breaking.  I’ve seen a couple lying flat in yards.  The last thing I want is for these to be eyesores.  Time — and particularly summertime — is tough on these signs.  My guess is that if I leave them up, none will be standing and legible by the time of next year’s election.

Two, they will have more impact if I take them down for a while, then put them up at the time of the next Town election.  At some point, your eye just skips over it, if it has been there long enough.  But in addition,

Three, at some level, although I was not thinking of the election when I had those printed, they’ve done as much as they can do, for now. I was mostly worried about my own little neighborhood.  But with the passage of 444 Maple West, and the likely passage of 380 Maple West, that didn’t work out so well.  But there is now some hope that we won’t do this to the rest of Maple.