Proposed Electronic Sign at St. William's Church Gets Public Hearing Wednesday

The Fridley Planning Commission holds a public hearing on a proposed electronic sign for the Church of St. William at its meeting Wednesday, 7 p.m., at .

The church is seeking a special use permit for a freestanding sign that includes a digital message feature. Fr. Joseph Whalen, St. William's pastor, wrote about the sign in the May 6 church bulletin:

I want to inform you of a possible upgrade to our existing outdoor signboard. We have contracted with an electronic message board company, WatchFire, to install a new electronic message board on the site of the existing manual-letter signboard facing 61st Ave. The new electronic board will allow us to program messages electronically from the parish office, then send those messages to the signboard by wireless routers.

What this means is that we will have much more flexibility to convey a large number of messages on any given day, without having to manually change letters. This board is also a full-color spectrum board, so along with text messages, we will also have additional capability to add graphic displays if needed. After much discussion on the Parish Finance Council, and comparison of competing bids and board designs, we chose WatchFire because we felt they offered excellent quality material, competitive pricing, and a better than industry-standard warranty. The total cost for the board, installation, and permits will be $26,000.00. While this is an unbudgeted expense, we will pay for this out of existing operating funds without negatively impacting this year’s budget.

Presently, our application for a city permit is in process. We will have a public hearing before the City’s planning board on May 16th, and if approved at that level, the application will go before the City Council on June 11th. We believe our proposal meets the criteria the city has set forth for electronic message boards, but of course we will not know until the process concludes if a permit will be granted. Assuming the permit is granted, we would hope to complete installation sometime in August, and hopefully, no later than Labor Day.

This is an exciting development for our parish community, as the new board will offer us the chance to communicate numerous parish events in a manner that will be attractive and informative for our community. I will keep you informed as the permit application and installation plans proceed.

at its April 9 meeting considered a similar special use permit for proposed 80 square-foot sign on Highway 65, with a 40 square-foot changeable text area.