Melvindale business owner known for tacking hundreds of ad signs to light poles sentenced

DETROIT – Following charges made in July 2023, William Shaw has been sentenced to 40 hours of community service for violating city sign regulations by repeatedly hanging commercial signs without proper authorization.

Shaw’s community service began on Friday (June 28) with a clear demonstration of the consequences of his actions. He started by removing illegally posted signs in the area of 7 Mile and Evergreen roads and then proceeded with the city’s blight team to additional locations.

Violations of sign regulations are considered a public nuisance because they create visual clutter.

Court documents revealed that Shaw was charged with 59 misdemeanor counts of violating city sign ordinance.

In 2022, Detroit’s Blight to Beauty program began a nuisance sign removal process intending to remove illegally placed signs after receiving resident complaints.

After 18 months of regular removals by the city’s blight remediation division and contact with business owners, the team witnessed a decline in illegal signage.

During the summer of 2023, the team removed an average of more than 400 signs, which decreased significantly from the average of more than 1,700 taken down over the same period the prior year.

Though the numbers were trending downward, some offenders were not removing their illegal signs because of warnings, which forced the city to take legal action.

William Shaw IV Initial Incident

Shaw’s Plumbing was the worst offender among the top 20 identified. From February 2022 to July 2023, the city used funds and manpower to take down more than 615 of Shaw’s signs in every corner of Detroit.

During the process, Shaw, who lives in Ecorse, received warnings for nuisance signage, including text messages sent to all known phone numbers, repeated phone calls, and cease-and-desist letters from the law department demanding he stop littering our city with his signs.

In addition to the warnings, the law department sent a Fair Warning Letter requesting that Shaws’ owner or representative attend a meeting on July 17, 2023, with the law department to address the ongoing violations of the city’s ordinance.

Shaw ignored all attempts to inform him of the sign ordinances and continued to nail his signs to city property.

Shaw placed hundreds of illegal signs in neighborhoods across Detroit and spent extra effort and money to keep them there.

Instead of a basic staple gun, Shaw used a nail gun with threaded nails and wide plastic collars, making removing them extremely difficult. In many cases, city workers had to use a box cutter to cut around the heavy-duty nail heads.

Shaw also had many of his signs mounted at heights, which made them hard to remove. He suggested that the person installing the signs was on a ladder or the back of a truck instead of on foot.

Detroit’s law department requested charges, and on July 28, 2023, the 36th District Court authorized charges on 59 counts of violating the city of Detroit’s sign ordinance.