Official: Boring names will stop rural Georgia sign theft

[September 27, 2010]  DARIEN, Ga. (AP) -- A rural Georgia county is losing about 550 street signs a years to thieves and a commissioner says he has a solution: Make the names boring.

McIntosh County Commissioner Mark Douglas serves a rural county about 60 miles south of Savannah. He says signs marking Green Acres, Boone's Farm and Mary Jane Lane are frequently stolen.

He suspects the thieves are targeting those signs because they share names with a popular TV series, a low-cost wine or, in the third case, a slang term for marijuana.

Then there's the stolen signs for Harmony Hill. Douglas figures the thieves just like the alliteration.

It's become a costly problem. County Manager Luther Smart says the area is paying $17,000 a year to replace the signs.

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Information from: The Florida Times-Union, http://www.jacksonville.com/

[Associated Press]

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