Melvindale man who plastered signs across Detroit ordered to clean up mess
In July 2023, William Shaw, owner of Shaw's Plumbing in Melvindale, was charged with 59 misdemeanors for tacking more than 615 illegal commercial signs to light poles across Detroit. On Friday, he joined the effort to take down other cluttered signs across the city.
Shaw's labor contributes to the City of Detroit Blight to Beauty program's nuisance sign removal process, which began back in 2022, to take down the thousands of illegally placed signs around the city. While the number of signs decreased by summer 2023, the city was forced to take legal action when some repeat offenders refused to quit − Shaw's Plumbing being the worst of the worst.
According to the city, Shaw's Plumbing was found to be the worst offender among the top 20 identified, requiring the city to dip into funds and manpower to take down signs in every corner of the city between February 2022 and July 2023.
To make matters worse, Shaw's Plumbing signs were harder to remove than most. Shaw's signs were placed using a nail gun with threaded nails that have wide plastic collars as opposed to a typical nail gun, often requiring city workers to use box cutters to cut around the heavy-duty nail heads.
They were also placed at tall heights, suggesting that the person installing the signs was on a ladder or back of a truck, which added another layer of difficulty in taking them off the light poles.
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Throughout the removal process, the law department sent Shaw repeated warnings for his sign usage, including text messages sent to all known phone numbers, repeated phone calls and cease-and-desist letters. They also sent a Fair Warning Letter, according to the city, requesting that the owner or representative of Shaw's Plumbing attend a meeting on July 17, 2023, with the law department to address the ongoing violations of the city’s ordinance.
Shaw ignored all communication attempts and continued to tack his signs to the city's property, so on July 28, 2023, Shaw was charged with 59 counts of violating the City of Detroit’s sign ordinance.
More recently, Shaw was sentenced to 40 hours of community service, but in an act of poetic justice, a 36th District Court judge ordered him to spend those hours the opposite way of how he earned them: removing illegally posted signs that other business owners have posted around Detroit.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Melvindale man ordered to clean up plastered signs across Detroit
