George Mason's Neighbors Say Flashy Sign Makes for Sore Eyes

A little bit of Times Square has arrived on the doorstep of Rohit Sharma's home in Fairfax County.

It's a glitzy sign two stories tall with a giant, pulsating TV screen the size of a minivan that flashes ads for all the fun doings across the street at George Mason University.

Sharma's reaction: Make it go away, please.

"It's like a big Jumbotron," said Sharma, 29, a health-care employee who has lived on Sideburn Road for about three years. "Seriously. It's been a big hassle since it's been here."

In a move to raise its profile as an up-and-coming educational powerhouse, the university erected the two-sided, $320,000 sign in August on Braddock and Sideburn roads, near the entrance to the Patriot Center.

There were some noble impulses behind its marketing effort, according to school officials. After the university's basketball team made it to the NCAA Final Four and after Nobel laureates arrived on campus, more and more people in the community were asking the university to keep them informed about campus events.

Some of the university's neighbors think it might have been better to be kept in the dark. They say the sign -- 25 feet high and 13 feet 6 inches wide -- is more suitable for the Big Apple or the Las Vegas strip, not a suburb of Colonial-style homes. But part of the need to draw attention to George Mason comes from its status as a suburban institution with no identifiable college town: Its campus sprawls across sprawl smack dab in the middle of Fairfax.

Still, as George Mason embarks on an ambitious, five-year, $400 million expansion and modernization program, some residents are annoyed that the university did not do a better job of informing the community about its plans.

"Do we have just a little kingdom unto itself?" one neighbor asked during a forum last week at the offices of Fairfax Supervisor Sharon S. Bulova (D-Braddock).

Daniel Walsch, a GMU spokesman, said the outcry has diminished since the school dimmed the illumination, altered the timing of the messages so they would not appear in such rapid-fire succession and set an 11 p.m. curfew for the sign. There are no plans to move it.

"From our perspective, things have quieted down a lot," he said. "It's not to say people are not still upset out there, but we're trying to work closer with the neighbors."

It didn't help that Virginia's attorney general gave an informal opinion that, as a state institution, George Mason was not obligated to follow the state code, which requires a permit from the commissioner of transportation to place a sign so close to the road.