Where, Oh Where Has My Street Sign Gone?

Something smells rotten on Skunk Lane. And no, it’s not the cute little fake skunks that all the residents of the street have on their front lawns.

Skunk is a road in Wilton where the streets signs often disappear.

Welcome to Wilton, where signs for creatively-named streets–like Chicken St., Kingdom Ridge Rd., Blueberry Hill Rd., Serendipity Lane, and the aforementioned Skunk Ln.–sometimes go missing, and even less out-of-the-ordinarily named roads disappear time and time again.

Over the last few weeks, it seems there’s been a rash of disappearing street signs in Wilton. Town officials know about at least 17 signs that have been taken down, which they say is an unusually high number to go missing around the same time–more than they’ve seen in a number of years. The theory that many people put out there is that it usually happens more frequently just before college students go back to school. Street signs from home are very cool dorm room decorations, don’t you think?

At least they’re not hurting anyone, right?

Wrong, stealing the roadsigns is not really a victimless crime.

“It costs the town $70 plus the labor to put it back up, so really, it easily costs $100 per sign to replace it,” says first selectman Lynne Vanderslice. It would certainly be much better if, instead of taking one down, to come to DPW and order one. We can have one made up for $70.”

Sometimes the sign thieves do worse:  “People have suggested we should bolt them in differently so that it couldn’t be removed at all, but the risk with that is that they’ll just take the entire sign, along with the post. That’s significantly more expensive for the town,” she says.

Reports of missing street signs were still coming in as of the end of last week. Vanderslice says the problem of what it costs the town is one factor. What is also really irritating for the people working in the DPW are all the other things that don’t get done because of it.

“Right now we’re doing 15 miles of paving and have made a lot of progress on that. It does take the guys away from other traditional work, like brush removal. We really want to get a lot of that done. You’re just basically wasting their time and taking them away from the things they’re supposed to do, when they have to go and put the signs back up. It’s inefficient work going all over the place,” Vanderslice explains.

So, who do town officials believe are behind the thefts? They agree with the theory that the culprits are college students.

“We do see signs that are missing before the start of the school year. The thought always is that it’s college students,” she says, adding that they expect the disappearances to stop now that kids have gone back to school, and they’re waiting to see if there will be any more sign-napping activity.

She hopes to get a message out to the people who are involved or those who know who the thieves are.

“We’d ask parents that, if your child has the sign, we’d appreciate if you’d come down and pay for it. If you have a senior in high school talk to them about this and ask them not to do it. If this is some group of people, the prank is upsetting a lot of people and I’d ask them to stop,” she says.