Spotsylvania County, VA Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

Sec. 6 lists the signs that are prohibited countywide, in every zoning district, rather than merely restricted by size or location. Item (4) targets digital technology directly, banning any sign or electronic or digital display with flashing or intermittent lights, copy or animated digital presentations in motion. The same subsection also bans any sign that is in motion by any means, including fluttering, rotating or wind-driven movement, though flags, weathervanes and permitted temporary or banner signs are carved out of that separate motion ban. The digital-sign prohibition has one narrow exception: electronic or digital displays that show date, time, temperature, weather, environmental conditions or other on-site business information.

Those displays are allowed only if each message stays up for at least four seconds before changing, which rules out the rapid message-cycling common on many commercial digital billboards, and the zoning administrator must find that the sign does not create a public safety or traffic hazard. That combination effectively rules out true digital billboards, which typically rotate multiple advertisers' messages every few seconds, while still letting a bank or pharmacy run a slow-changing time-and-temperature display. Chapter 23 also separately bans signs attached to trees or utility poles, signs imitating official traffic signals, and strings of light bulbs used to attract attention, all under the same Sec.

6 prohibited-sign list. A business wanting any of these prohibited sign types has no special-use-permit path around this section; unlike the height and size standards in Sec. 7, division 8 does not authorize the board of supervisors to grant relief from the prohibited-sign list itself.