Sign Here Operations Moving Back To Borough

MATAMORAS — Matamoras Borough Council granted past Westfall Township Asst. Fire Chief Howard Vobis a conditional use permit to locate his Sign Here Sign Co. at 808 Pennsylvania Ave. in the borough. Vobis is a Borough resident. His family has lived in either Westfall Township or the borough for three generations. Sign Here started in the borough in 1991, but Vobis moved the business to larger quarters on Jersey Avenue in Port Jervis in 1995.

The council took action at their regular council meeting held at Borough Hall last week requesting that Vobis meet two conditions:

• Securing a Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP) Sewage Module plan approval;
• Filing an easement with the borough stipulating that the property owner of 810 Pennsylvania Avenue (a residence owned by Vobis) allows the 808 property a driveway access to 9th Street.
Vobis said, "I enjoyed working in Port, but I wanted to return to the borough for years. An adjacent property owner on Jersey Avenue [Samaki] wanted to expand.

"They wanted to access part of my property for a driveway. We negotiated for a year and they agreed to buy the building. I had an opportunity to buy the 808 and 810 Pennsylvania Avenue property.

"The sale of the Jersey Avenue building and the great offer on the two properties in the borough allowed me to relocate back to Matamoras.

"When I first moved to the Jersey Avenue property, it was a bakery. We had to do major modifications to make it work for a sign-company needs. With the 808 Pennsylvania Avenue property, we have a building that we can customize for a sign company."

Vobis said that Sign Here is the largest sign installation-and-maintenance contract company in the region. He serves clients mainly in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and part of Connecticut. The work ranges from the small to large. Regarding the larger work, he said, "We are the major-plaza sign contractors for the big-box stores, hotels, motels, and auto dealers."

Sign Here does smaller jobs as well, such as awnings. He did Woogie's Deli awning on Route 209 in Port, signs in Airport Park, vinyl wraps on Eastern Pike Regional Police patrol cars when they first began serving Westfall and Matamoras, wraps on consumer and business vehicles and boats, and the building signs on two fireworks-company signs in Westfall Township. Sign Here designed and installed the electronic signs for the entrances to Best Western Inn and the Delaware Valley School District main campus on Route 6/209.

According to Vobis, Sign Here has cranes, bucket trucks, backhoes, and the largest wide-format vinyl-sign printer in the area. The printer can do five-foot by 50-foot signs or seam together signs to make 10x100-foot signs or larger. For information about the company, go to www.signheresignco.com or call (800) Neonlit (636-6548)... for complete story, get this week's issue.

Pike Hazard Mitigation Plan Includes Five New Hazards

MILFORD — As the physicalities of Pike County evolve, so do hazards, according to Mike Mrozinski, planning director at Pike County Office of Community Planning. He and other county and municipal officials have identified five new hazards to address in the recent update of the Pike County Hazard Mitigation Plan. The 2002 federal Disaster Mitigation Act requires states to regularly update their disaster mitigation plans to ensure their eligibility for FEMA assistance, should a disaster occur, and that responsibility was shared with counties and municipalities. So every five years, beginning in 2006, Pike County has updated its hazard mitigation plan. All 13 municipalities must pass resolutions to adopt it. The new plan is 1,153 pages, including 657 pages of appendices.

"Municipalities look at impacts over five years and see what they need, what they can remove, to minimize hazards," said Mrozinski. "It assists with grant funding."

The five hazards added to the 12 assembled in the 2006 and 2011 plans include invasive species, radon, landslides, lightning, and extreme temperatures. For some hazards, strategies are simple.

"When lightning strikes, there's not much you can do but be aware," Mrozinski said. "At sporting events, when you hear thunder, you scatter. The game is over until the storm is over. This is not a high lightning zone, but you need to be aware."

But invasive species arrive in many forms and disrupt in multiple ways. Most familiar is the tick. It becomes a problem soon after hatching, when it eats its first "blood meal," often a white-footed mouse, from which it also takes pathogens, says Mrozinski. "Then it looks toward larger mammals."

One strategy to stop the cycle involves filling toilet paper rolls with cotton sprayed with the insecticide permethrin and leaving them around, so mice use the cotton to build nests. Permethrin can also be put on rollers that slide across the heads and necks of deer at deer feeders, as they lean in to feed. But burning leaves, where ticks often linger, does not kill them, and removing leaves is difficult, he said.

"This is the perfect tick environment, with rodents, mammals, and children from urban areas who are unaware," Mrozinski said. "We work with schools and doctors, but the state doesn't do adequate testing to know the percentage of ticks carrying disease. A high percentage of them carry impactful diseases, and Lyme is most prevalent, but there are many more."

He urges walking on roads and paths away from leaves and tall grass and treating pets with permethrin regularly. "You miss a week, and things happen," Mrozinski says.

As for landslides, he said, "Flash floods and small storms send lots of water into small tributary streams, and there's more runoff. Mass erosion results in localized ground destabilization, and then landslides impact roadways." In addition to causing road washouts, frequent high water results in "bridge scour" that damages the substructure of bridges. Stormwater plans and construction techniques should take these problems into consideration, especially with poor soil permeability preventing water absorption, he said.

"Homeowners reroute water on their property, not conscious of repercussions that can result downstream. With more development, there are more impervious surfaces. With new techniques, you can keep stormwater on site."

To address road and bridge damage, five dollars was added to Pike County car registration fees, Mrozinski said. Another hazard that results from the county's rocky terrain is radon. Quiet, invisible, and odorless, it results in 21,000 cancer deaths annually in the U.S., he said... for complete story, get this week's issue.