News Highlights
- As allowed by state law, the county will now charge violators a $10 per sign administrative cost.
- This is in addition to the $100 civil penalty per sign.
Following action by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, Fairfax will begin recovering a portion of its costs for enforcing the Signs in the Highway Program as allowed by state law. Violators will now be charged a $10 per sign administrative cost in addition to the $100 per sign civil penalty that is currently levied against offenders.
The Signs in the Highway Program began in 2013, when the county entered into an agreement with VDOT to enable it to remove signs from public rights-of-way. The board selected 99 major highways on which to focus its efforts. Most are two-lane, divided highways like Route 286 (formerly Fairfax County Parkway), Route 50 and Route 28. Signs are not removed from neighborhood streets, nor are they cleaned up based on public complaints.
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The Sheriff’s Community Labor Force collects signs every week from Tuesday to Thursday. The crews, made up of well-screened offenders monitored by a Sheriff’s deputy, visit each highway in the program at least twice per month. Signs are stored at the I-66 Transfer Station for five days, allowing owners time to reclaim them. After this time, the signs are destroyed. This effort costs the Sheriff’s Office approximately $180,000 annually.
Over the past three years, crews have picked up an average of nearly 30,000 signs per year—more than 75,000 in total since the program started.
In May 2016, the county further developed its enforcement efforts by identifying violators, documenting their illegal signs, and issuing warning letters and invoices to the offenders. The county spent approximately $120,000 on these efforts in the last year in addition to the Sheriff’s Office costs. This amounts to an average cost of $10 per sign.
Since the County began fining sign violators, it has collected more than $30,000 in civil penalties.
Residents can also play a major role in keeping the highways clean by volunteering with a VDOT-sponsored Adopt-a-Highway group. These groups may pick up trash and signs along roads VDOT identifies.
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