Walnut Creek Rewrites Sign Rules For Modern Businesses

WALNUT CREEK, CA — Walnut Creek is considering its most significant update to city sign regulations in years, a proposal that would legalize several sign types that are currently prohibited, speed up permit approvals for many businesses, and give downtown merchants more flexibility while preserving the city's standards for attractive, high-quality development.

The Walnut Creek Design Review Commission will hold a study session Wednesday on a draft overhaul of the city's sign ordinance.

The goal is to clarify the role of signs throughout the city, modernize design standards, and create more flexible regulations that reflect changing business needs and current sign technology while limiting visual clutter and protecting neighborhood character.

City planners say the proposal recognizes that signs play an important role in helping customers find businesses, providing public information, and creating a sense of place while balancing those benefits with pedestrian safety, traffic safety, and community aesthetics.

Biggest Changes

Among the biggest proposed changes is allowing several sign types that Walnut Creek currently prohibits or does not clearly regulate.

The draft would establish standards for painted wall signs, architectural banners, portable A-frame and sandwich-board signs, projected light signs that use LED or laser projectors, and skyline signs identifying major tenants near the tops of buildings.

Portable signs would generally be allowed in the downtown core without a separate sign permit if they meet city standards, although signs placed in the public right-of-way would still require an encroachment permit from Public Works.

The ordinance would also shift more routine sign approvals from the Design Review Commission to the Community Development Director, allowing many applications to receive administrative approval instead of requiring public hearings.

The proposal also creates a new process allowing the director to approve limited deviations from sign standards to address site-specific conditions without sending every request through a discretionary review process.

The draft also strengthens procedures for removing abandoned, unsafe, unauthorized, or deteriorated signs, updates Master Sign Program requirements for shopping centers and office complexes, and adds standards tailored to different zoning districts, land uses, and sign types.

Commissioners will be asked to provide policy guidance on eight major issues, including whether businesses set far back from streets should receive additional sign area, whether hotel wall signs should double in size from 25 square feet to 50 square feet, whether freeway-oriented sign rules should also apply along BART tracks and other regional transportation corridors, how internally illuminated cabinet signs should be regulated, and whether portable signs should require annual permits.

The commission will also discuss incentives for updating outdated Master Sign Programs, additional standards for the downtown pedestrian retail district, and whether other parts of the city need area-specific sign regulations.

Commissioners will not vote on the ordinance Wednesday but will provide feedback to city staff and consultants.

Following the study session, city staff and consultants will revise the draft based on the commission's comments before releasing a public review draft and presenting it to the Planning Commission and City Council for formal hearings later this summer.

The city expects the ordinance update to qualify for a California Environmental Quality Act exemption because officials believe it will not have a significant environmental impact.