Crusader snuffs out `snipes'

Mike Nichols, a real estate agent in Royal Palm Beach, woke up one morning about two weeks ago to find his neighborhood blanketed with little yellow signs from a competitor saying "We Will Sell Your Home" for a cut-rate commission of 4 percent.

The signs were irritating, and not only because they offered a hard-to-beat deal to house sellers. Nichols says they violated the law for being in the public right-of-way.

"I called up the guy and I said I don't appreciate these illegal signs," Nichols told me. "He said, `So what?'

"I said, `Well, I'm pulling your signs right now.'"

Of course, the guy told him to leave his signs alone. Which only inflamed Nichols further.

"His arrogance and his hostility is what got me going," Nichols said.

So Nichols started picking up the signs, doing his bit to clean up a form of litter that appears on little wire poles just about everywhere a telephone pole isn't available.

They're known as snipe signs, cheap advertising planted along the roadways for such high-class enterprises as quick weight loss, cheap loans and the chance to earn $1,000 a week from home. In most jurisdictions, they're against the law.

Nichols' eyes were opened. All of a sudden, this man who has lived in Palm Beach County for 40 of his 46 years began seeing snipe signs everywhere.

"We'll Buy Your Home for Cash." "Driveway Repair." "Insurance."

"I began pulling them," he said.

A week ago Saturday, he yanked 125 signs on Southern Boulevard in less than an hour, laying them in the bed of his black Ranger pickup truck and hauling them away.

That Sunday, he collected another 115 in an hour and 15 minutes. On Monday he grabbed another 75.

By the time I visited him on Saturday morning, the sudden crusader had more than 400 of them stacked in rows in his back yard. His few hours of collecting had produced a veritable outdoor warehouse of shlock.

"Screen Builders." "Pressure Cleaning." "Affordable Health Insurance." "Purchase or Refinance 1.25%."

"Yard Signs (Like This One)."

So far, nobody's clocked him.

"Actually, I've had drivers go by, giving me the thumbs-up," he said.

Sheriff's deputies haven't bothered him, apparently agreeing that the signs have the same status as litter.

Within a week, he had set up a web site encouraging other people to follow his example in snipe-hunting www.stopsnipesigns.com, arguing that the signs are an eyesore that mock Palm Beach County's image as a tourist mecca.

He'd called county commissioners and code enforcers to ask why the signs, though illegal, are proliferating. Their answer: code enforcers are too busy with more important matters and mostly leave it to volunteers in the Adopt-A-Road cleanup program.

"The commissioners are just looking the other way, and the state of affairs marches on," Nichols steamed.

He's got a point. If a few of these advertisers were nailed with appreciable fines, maybe we'd see less of their tacky handiwork. As things stand, the signs are so commonplace, "one-third of the companies are saying they didn't know it was illegal," Nichols said.

This being campaign season, you may have noticed one or two signs along the highways advertising candidates for political office.

It came as a shock to Nichols to realize that some of these, too, are up illegally -- mainly those in road rights-of-way (Certain municipalities allow them in places).

I called the leading campaigns for sheriff about this. Fred Mascaro and top aides to Ric Bradshaw and Ken Eggleston all said they have tried to follow the law and put their signs up on private property, and with the owners' permission -- but overzealous volunteers often put them up in median strips and along the roads' edges, where they don't belong.

It will be interesting to see how long after today's primary the losers' signs stay up. The county gives them 10 days to come down, said John Meyers, senior code enforcement officer.

I hope Nichols is making room in the back of his truck.

Howard Goodman's column is published Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. He can be reached at hgoodman@sun-sentinel.com or 561-243-6638.