City of Bixby Gets Serious about the City’s Image

Sign and banners have exploded out of control and the city of Bixby, OK has suffered tremendously as a result. As a tiny suburb, you might expect a town to be trashy looking and not have any enforced sign ordinances, but as the Tulsa suburb with the highest average home price, your would not expect the city to be plagued with corner snipe signs, sagging banners, and off-site promotions which litter the town and detract from its otherwise clean look. Mayor Ray Bowen has taken the city’s image seriously. In a recent conversation, Bowen stated that allocating funds for employees to enforce the code has been the problem. It only takes a handful of businesses to abuse the unenforced policies to make Bixby look bad.

Many city businesses are behind the cleanup. Off-site signage without a permit from one business creates an unfair advantage to other businesses that choose to follow the rules. As a Realtor, it is easier to throw signs up on every corner in town than it is to explain to a home seller why you are choosing to follow the rules to maintain the attractiveness of the area. You can imagine the pressure many home sellers place on their agent to break the rules… after all it is only one house.

What really has to happen is consumers in Bixby must demand that businesses not litter their city with signs that break the ordinances. Consumers should be vocal about it in a friendly manner. When business owners receive peer pressure and see no benefit to the sign clutter they create, they will stop.

Darryl Baskin is a Tulsa, OK real estate broker. Recognized by Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate, Regents.com, Allen Hainge CyberStars, and Star Power as a national leader in real estate sales and customer service. Darryl Baskin and The Baskin Real Estate Specialists of McGraw Realtors serve clients in the Tulsa, OK area including Broken Arrow, Jenks, Owasso, Bixby, Coweta, Glenpool, Sapulpa, Claremore, and other Tulsa Metro area cities helping home sellers and home buyers make sound decisions in their real estate transactions.