Salinas, CA Sign Regulations: Digital Billboards (2026)

Sec. 620(d)(4) bars any movement or apparent movement of a sign, and any change in the intensity of its illumination, including changeable copy, which is the same technology that makes a digital billboard or electronic message board function. The section carves out only five uses that may run changeable or moving copy: public service information signs, marquee signs, and changeable copy signs for theaters, cinemas, religious assembly uses, public/private schools, and service station price signs. Everything else, including a commercial LED display advertising products or businesses, falls outside those exceptions and is barred.

Sec. 590(f), the division's general prohibited-signs list, backs this up by separately banning animated, flashing, moving, or rotating signs except where otherwise allowed elsewhere in the division, meaning the code doubles down on the ban rather than leaving it to one section. The code separately defines an Electronic Readerboard as a changeable copy sign made of a matrix of computer-controlled lamps, confirming that digital message boards are treated as changeable copy signs subject to the movement ban. On top of the animation ban, new off-site billboards are barred outright: Sec.

630(c) states that, apart from temporary off-site subdivision directional signs and specified exempt signs, off-site advertising signs are not permitted within the city at all, and existing off-site advertising signs are frozen as nonconforming, only reconstructable or relocatable under a formal relocation agreement with the city consistent with California Business and Professions Code Section 5412, and only within the IGC district.