Some 200 anti-property tax signs disappeared over the course of several weeks from lawns lining a high-traffic stretch of Georgia Avenue just before a 8.3 percent increase to Montgomery County’s property tax rates was proposed.
Anti-tax crusader Robin Ficker placed the green-and-white signs with his signature “Save Our Homes” message calling for “Property Tax Relief,” which were always accompanied by another yard sign championing fellow tax-relief advocate Mark Fennel’s campaign for County Council.
When the duo discovered it was the county’s Department of Permitting Services that was removing the signs, they were outraged.
Fennel and Ficker said they put their signs on 26 lawns on four occasions between March 8 and March 18, and within days of each drop-off, the signs had disappeared.
Ficker said a county employee driving a white county van spotted by Fennel yanking the signs told him the signs, which are standard political yard sign size of 26 inches by 14 inches, were too big and that homeowners would have to have a permit to display them.
Ficker, a former state assembly member and county executive candidate, and a perennial tax foe, said he knows the business of yard signs and there were no problems with their dimensions.
Susan Scala-Demby, county zoning manager, confirmed the county had taken the signs but said problems stemmed from where the signs were placed, not their size.
“From our perspective, they were illegally placed,” Scala-Demby said. “The county is pretty specific and says you can’t have a yard sign within five feet of the private property line, and those signs were in the public right of way.”
Ficker contests that assessment.
“They are obviously inhibiting freedom of expression,” Ficker said. “I think if these signs said ‘raise property taxes,’ they wouldn’t be picking them up.”
The residents hosting the signs, however, said they weren’t very concerned.
“Of course my husband and I told him he could put the signs up. All the world is concerned about tax increases because everything is so expensive here,” homeowner Leonor Hernandez said in Spanish. “But really, I think we just said he could put the signs there to be nice. If they want to take them down, that’s OK, too.”
