Moody’s Believe It or Not (vol. 1)

In an effort to declutter the local landscape a rural South Dakota county passed an ordinance forbidding all signage, except for state mandated directional and speed limit signs along a 97 mile stretch of Highway 212 between the towns of Newell and Dupree. Another county ordinance however made it impossible to enforce the roadside sign ban unless a notice of the ban was posted every 200 yards for the length of the sign free zone. Officials quickly got to work and ordered 854 aluminum signs proclaiming the ban at a cost of $20,496.42, along with 854 sign posts at a cost of $3,843.05, and paid a local fencing company $16,087.71 to install them. Upon completing the project it was determined that the ban was legally in effect only on the south side of the highway where the signs had been posted because they only faced people traveling from west to east, and could not easily be seen by people traveling from east to west. Three months and an additional $40,427.18 later the ban was in full force.

Now nearly a year after the ban's implementation a former employee of the fencing company has reported that several extra signs and posts were left over and eventually discarded, and that due to an equipment malfunction all the signs had inadvertently been placed 206 yards apart instead of the required minimum spacing of 200 yards, making the sign ban unenforceable. The county council is scheduled to take up the matter next week. Believe It or Not!