Chester planners consider bylaw change to allow LED sign for GM, but zoning glitch may preclude it

By Shawn Cunningham
© 2025 Telegraph Publishing

On Monday evening, Chester’s Planning Commission got down to work on an issue that’s been on its radar for a while. That being “electric message display” signs or EMDs. The idea of such a sign for Green Mountain Union High School has been raised at past planning meetings by Chester resident Randy Miles.

But by Tuesday, it was clear that approving the sign for the high school might be a bit more complex than originally believed. More on that shortly.

Commission chair Hugh Quinn said that a number of issues, including an application for the town to have a state designated development area, had occupied the panel’s time. But now, with the town’s Neighborhood Development Area application in the hands of the Vermont’s Community Investment Board, the commission could return to the the question of EMDs.

Town Planner Preston Bristow said that many towns have approved such signs for use by schools and by the municipality itself. For Chester, adding the signs would mean amending the town’s zoning bylaws, which would require two public hearings: one at the commission level and one by the Select Board.

Bristow and commission member Carl Henshaw had worked on draft language laying out the standards for the such signs specifically in the Village Mixed Use District of town and only for municipal and school properties. That district is laid out in several pieces including an area of Main Street from the vet clinic to Pleasant Street, then along both sides of Pleasant to the railroad tracks. It also includes the area along Route 103 south near GMUHS, so, according to planners, the Public Safety Building and the high school could apply for conditional use permits to have such signs.

Chester-Andover Elementary School, Town Hall, the Town Garage and other municipally owned buildings are not in the Village Mixed Use District and could not have such signs.

Bristow said that in drafting the bylaw language, they considered what they wanted and what they don’t want. Thus, the draft specifies a maximum size and says that motion and video will not be allowed. The draft limits the signs to two colors and mandates sensors to adjust the brightness of the display to ambient lighting. The signs could only be on from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Over the course of a relatively brief meeting, commission members discussed how many lines of type the sign could have and how long a message would be on the screen before another appears. Everyone – including Miles -agreed that they did not want a “Vegas” style presentation. He called the sign “crucially important” for GMUHS.

And with that the meeting was adjourned.

Now to the complex part: A zoning glitch or a slip of the pen?

Recalling that Green Mountain Union High and the property just south of it had been re-zoned last year when the town began looking at the latter as a possible site for a housing development, The Telegraph took a closer look at the current district maps.

What we noticed was that just a sliver of red – the color denoting the Village Mixed Use district, that would allow the EMD sign — protruding into the orange of the high school driveway. Orange is the color of the Neighborhood District that accounts for a large part of downtown Chester, apparently including the high school, which would preclude the high school from having the sign. Was that put there intentionally or just a glitch in coloring the maps, created by the Mount Ascutney Regional Commission?

On Tuesday afternoon, when Quinn, who also serves as the town’s Zoning Administrator, looked at the map, he saw the same thing. Asked if he thought that was what the planning commission intended, Quinn said he didn’t know, but that it would be odd to make a tiny piece of land part of a mixed use district since it really couldn’t be used for anything.

Quinn said he did not recall any discussion of making a small part of the GMUHS land a different district when the changes were made last year. But he said that he would look at meeting minutes to determine the intent of the commission at that time.

“I’m going to have to get to the bottom of that,” Quinn told The Telegraph. If the school is entirely zoned Neighborhood, the draft bylaw revision reviewed on Monday won’t help put an LED sign in front of it.

The next meeting of the Planning Commission will be in October, but it has not been decided whether it will be on the second or third Monday.