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(May 2010) posted on Mon Apr 26, 2010

The sign industry’s trinity exhibits at the American Planning Assn. conference.

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By Wade Swormstedt

On March 21, the second day of spring, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 219-212 to approve the landmark, $875 billion, health-care reform bill. Voting epitomized partisanship as not a single Republican voted for it, while 34 Democrats also voted against it. When other landmark, health-care legislation, Medicare and Medicaid, was passed in 1965, a slight majority of Republicans (70-68) voted for the measure.

By the time you read this, the ISA Sign Expo 2010 in Orlando will be in the record books. The day the show closed, ISA representatives, as well as people from the United States Sign Council (USSC) and the Signage Foundation Inc., were busy on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, exhibiting at the April 10-13 National Planning Conference of the American Planning Assn. (APA) in New Orleans. Six of the 78 APA exhibitors came from the on-premise sign industry. Besides these three groups, sign-industry exhibitors included Peachtree City Foamcraft, the Jim Pattison Sign Group and Skyline Electronic Price Displays.

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With three nonprofit entities, the sign industry was well represented. It needed to be. The only other apparent trade associations exhibiting were the Brick Industry Assn. and the Vinyl Siding Institute.

The APA website listed 92 pages of sessions. All sessions were categorized under one or more of the 49 topics. The only one that mentioned signage, “Advances in Signs and Regulation,” was held on Sunday at 7:30 a.m. The two speakers were attorney John Baker and law professor Daniel Mandelker, best known to the sign industry as a co-author of both the seminal Street Graphics (1971) and Street Graphics and the Law (1988). The session was listed under the topic of “law,” but not “economic development.”