Editorial policy

This page describes how the city pages listed on US Sign Code are sourced, checked and corrected. It records the procedure actually in place for the city checkers and city guides on this site.

Who publishes

Pages are written and maintained by USSignCode Editorial, the operator described on the about page. There are no individual bylines, and we claim no professional qualification in law, planning or sign engineering. Nothing here is legal advice, and using these pages creates no advisory relationship.

What counts as a source

A rule is taken from the ordinance itself — the municipal code as the city or its official code publisher posts it — and from the city's own permitting pages for procedural steps and fees. Of the 24 city pages, 17 currently cite the ordinance text and 7 cite the city's own permitting or guidance pages; none is without a linked source. Where the checker looks up a zoning district, it queries that city's own open-data service rather than a third-party map; 12 cities have such a lookup today. Sign-industry blogs, contractor marketing pages and news summaries are not used as the source of a rule, however accurate they may be, because they are a description of the code rather than the code.

Sources are recorded on the page

Where a page runs a checker, the rule set carries the ordinance chapter it was built from, the official text it was verified against, the date of that check, and the zoning dataset the lookup queries. City guides link the code sections they describe. A source mentioned in prose but not linked does not count for the audit: it only registers a source that is an actual link on the page, and it lists every page with no linked source until one is added.

The checks that run on their own

Each covered city has an ordinance watcher that runs on its own monthly cycle, fetches the city's sign-code page and reports when the text it watches changes. For nine cities, an ordinance-event watcher runs every Friday and reads council and planning agendas so a pending amendment is seen before it lands. A numeric audit runs every Saturday: it takes the figures shown on each page, fetches the sources linked from that page, and checks whether each figure appears in the source text — confirmed, not found, or uncollected that week.

The audit also judges the source. When almost none of a page's figures appear in the document it cites, the finding is that the source does not cover the page, and the page is queued for a better one. A source that fails to load three weeks running is reported as unrecoverable, and collected source text is kept as a local copy so one bad week at the code publisher is not mistaken for a changed ordinance. Every push to the site runs an integrity scan that rejects truncated or half-written pages before they are published.

What happens when a figure does not match

The ordinance wins, not the page. If the code now reads differently, the page and the checker's rule set are edited to match it. If a figure cannot be found in any ordinance or official city page, it is removed rather than replaced with a plausible substitute. If the figure is right but the cited section does not carry it, the citation is replaced with the section that does.

Numbers that are ours

Some numbers are not the code's: worked examples, the values a checker starts with, and assumptions a page states as its own. So are estimates of costs the ordinance does not set, such as fabrication or installation quotes and how long a plan review takes in practice. These are outside the source check.

AI in the workflow

Drafts, page structure and explanatory text are produced with the help of AI tools. A figure we add or change is checked against the ordinance text that sets it, and the Saturday audit then re-checks the published figures against the same documents.

Reporting an error

A correction that names the city, the rule you think is wrong and the ordinance section you are reading is the one we can act on directly. Where to send it is on the contact page.

Limits to carry with any result

A screening result is not a zoning determination. Overlays, historic and corridor districts, planned-development agreements, prior variances and the measured facade of a specific building can all change the answer, and none of them are in a public zoning layer. Ordinances are amended on the city's timetable, and a page reflects the code as it read when it was last checked. Confirm with the permitting office before fabrication.