Sean Wharton’s Sign Doesn’t Seem Legal But For Sure It Is Dangerous

We encountered the above “sign” for Sean Wharton, Candidate for Summit County Council, on the frontage road across from Fresh Market in Pinebrook.

While the county laws regarding campaign signs are more lax than regular signs, it appears that campaign signs cannot legally be in the public right-of-way according to the County’s web page on campaigning. 

More importantly, this is a dangerous sign. First, the truck is only a couple of feet off the narrow shoulder. Secondly, anyone who has tried to pull out of Fresh Market knows that the traffic coming from the right can’t be seen. It’s a blind spot. If a someone pulled into the road, and the oncoming traffic needed to veer out of the way there would be nowhere to go. Third, it’s the first day with real snow in the Basin. It’s slick and visibility is limited. It doesn’t take much to imagine a car sliding off the road 5 feet and hitting this truck.

This is important because the county council’s responsibilities include legislative duties. They “make” the laws in Summit County. In order to make the laws, they must have good judgement. This shows bad judgement from someone. Now, we don’t know that Mr Wharton was directly responsible for this sign but it doesn’t look good, and we as voters do tend to attribute what supporters do to the candidate.

As always, we don’t endorse candidates, but we do point out stupid. This seems to be a case of the latter.