Street signs are more than just prized decorations for garages and frat houses.
From directing traffic to letting drivers and pedestrians know where they are, street signs serve a number of vital functions. Two of those most important functions — community beautification and increased public safety — fall directly in line with Evans officials’ vision for the city’s future.
With the opening of a city shop that prints the reflective sheeting for the signs last June, the city has greatly expedited at least a piece of those processes.
“Two birds, one stone,” communications specialist Dan Karpiel said.
Located in the city’s municipal operations center at 1958 40th St., the shop was repurposed from offices and meeting areas into a full-fledged sign-making operation.
“A lot of it was underutilized space,” Operations Superintendent Daniel Kiefer said.
Not anymore. In just 10 months, sign technician Jeremy Allen estimates he’s made about 1,200 signs — many of which are already up around the city.
Each sign Allen prints costs the city anywhere from half up to a quarter of what it would cost to buy the signs from an outside company, he said.
“To order a standard stop sign, it’s about $80 plus shipping,” Allen said. “It costs me, last time I checked, about $22. And it’s better quality.”
The signs meet all requirements put forth by the U.S. Department of Transportation Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. The manual lays out safety requirements for everything from height to reflectiveness to what posts the signs are mounted on, but it leaves some room for cities to make signs feel unique.
The Evans signs are also printed with a protective laminate, which protects them from natural elements like UV rays, as well as vandalism such as graffiti. That option is available to order, but working with a limited budget, few, if any, of the signs around Evans before the shop featured the laminate.
“We think in the long term, instead of replacing signs, we’ll be able to clean them up and have them back up much sooner,” Public Works and Utilities Director Ty Bereskie said.
Two specialty signs for events sit in front of several construction signs, among others, Tuesday at the city’s sign shop, 1958 40th St. The shop can print signs at half or a quarter of the price of what it would cost to order them. (Chris Bolin/Staff Reporter)The idea for the shop came to be in 2023, when city council expressed interest in upgrading city signs, many of which were heavily faded or contained old versions of the city logo. After just a handful of conversations with City Manager Cody Sims, the shop went from not even an idea to a concrete reality.
“It became a priority,” Bereskie said. “Within six months, we were ordering equipment, hiring Jeremy (Allen) and getting up and going to start turning over all the signs in the city.”
The city’s goal is to replace all the signs in Evans as soon as possible. Realistically, taking man power and financing into play, they estimate it will take roughly five years.
Aside from service requests for old or damaged signs — of which there are plenty — Evans is prioritizing signage on major roadways and high-traffic areas, neighborhoods with signage that isn’t uniform with the rest of the city and stretches undergoing capital improvement projects, such as the new police station and 37th Street widening project.
Recently, crews replaced all the signs in the Ridge neighborhood off 42nd Street, between 23rd Avenue and 29th Avenue, in which the old signs were a different color and featured the name of the neighborhood’s developer.
“Signs are a lot of the appearance of a city that no one thinks about,” Kiefer said. “It’s the book cover you judge everything by.”
Especially with such a fluid border with Greeley, signs are a big way the city can let people know definitively that they are in Evans. That’s why all new signs — at least all that allow it — have the cities logo somewhere on the sign.
Though the shop doesn’t shape the metal backings or forge the sign posts, the city said just creating the reflective signage themselves has already shown massive dividends.
The equipment in the shop — primarily the printer and the laminator — cost the city just upward of $65,000.
Kiefer said the city would not be replacing nearly as many signs — especially not with the quality of signs they are using — if they weren’t able to print them in house, so it makes calculating the savings a bit tricky. But with that in mind, he estimates the equipment will pay for itself in just a year or two.
And though many from the city pitch in, as of right now, Allen is essentially a one-man band when it comes to making the signs. Kiefer anticipates adding staff moving forward, but he’s not yet sure when that may happen.
“We clearly need more staff now, but we don’t know how many,” he said. “And the project is going to be bigger initially than eventually. Eventually it will just be maintenance. But even that’s never been done on a routine basis, so it’s going to be determining what level staffing we’ll need.”
Along with the additional staff, Kiefer and Allen would like to see the operation expand past just signs. Similar to the sign shop, the city could buy the equipment to repaint road lanes instead of contracting the work.
But that’s a conversation for a different day, in a different fiscal year.
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