Last night we told you about an unusual problem in Bemidji. The city has paid thousands of dollars over the years replacing a street sign that's been popular with pranksters. Stoner Avenue is the road's name but as Valley News Live discovered other cities and counties deal with a similar problem.
We're kind of out in the middle of now where. Just a couple miles east of Perham. The traffic is pretty light, but about eight years ago that was part of the draw for folks looking to get their hands on unique signs.
"Shortly after the signs were put up we noticed that a particular street sign kept disappearing," says Brian Armstrong the address coordinator for Otter Tail County. He says as you can only imagine it wasn't just the desolate location of the sign. But it had more to do with its numbers 420, which is a popular code for pot smoking that lead to the signs frequent disappearance.
Armstrong was alerted to the missing signs by folks who passed by, "that was number 420, 420th Street and 420th Avenue. We had pretty much decided we had to rename these two streets and avenues to something other than that so we could keep the signs up."
The signs were only up six months before the county got rid of them, so 420th Avenue and 420th Street had to change. One has now become Minnesota Street and the other Harvest Avenue. Even though the price tag is hefty at about 150 dollars a pop for each sign, Armstrong tells Valley News Live that's not the most painful part. "Many people forget their initial goal was to deliver emergency services not to deliver the mail so it's very critical those signs stay in place," explains Armstrong.
Because if you're out in the middle of rural Otter Tail County and the ambulance can't find you, one could only hope it's not because your sign was just too enticing. But Armstrong says more than likely that's the sad truth of the matter,"if you put up a Johnson Avenue in a northern Minnesota region, that's probably going to end up in someone's garage a lot of the times or a dorm room."
So your probably wondering about the consequences, if you're caught with a sign you could face a misdemeanor and the cost of the sign, around a couple hundred bucks. But worse yet, if you steal signs that could endanger someone's life, like a stop sign, you could be slapped with a civil liability charge.
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