Sign Regulations (No General Sign Permit; Historic District/Landmark Signs Require Commission and Board Approval) in Saguache, Colorado

Saguache requires a sign regulations (no general sign permit; historic district/landmark signs require commission and board approval) for: No general townwide sign permit application, fee schedule, or approval process exists in Saguache — confirmed via a full-code Municode search for 'sign permit' (10 results, none a distinct permit product with an application/fee) and 'change of use', plus a direct read of Chapter 15 in full, and confirmed against the Town's Application for Building Site Permit, whose 10 project-type checkboxes (New Construction, Addition, Bridges/Walkways/Driveways, Roof Replacement, Fence or Deck, Demolition, Mobile Home, Single/Multi Unit Residence, Lot Level Change, Commercial) do not include 'Sign'; Sec. 15-2-80 (Sidewalk Displays), Chapter 15 Land Use Regulations, Article 2: any commercial retail display on a sidewalk must permit adequate pedestrian use and must be taken in at the conclusion of business hours; the Board of Trustees may permit temporary seasonal displays to be kept on the sidewalk 24 hours a day for a specified time period; commercial displays are not permitted on the Town streets; Sandwich board signs (defined as any sign of A-frame design, posted periodically to reflect commercial 'specials') are limited to no larger than three feet by four feet, per Sec. 15-2-80(1); Special pennants and banners (cloth or paper, announcing specials, products, special events, or 'Open' status) must be located so pedestrian/vehicular traffic is not impaired and vehicular vision is not compromised; banners for specific civic events (e.g. posted over a roadway) may be erected up to two weeks prior to the event and must be removed at its conclusion, per Sec. 15-2-80(2); Within a Town-designated historic landmark, contributing structure, or historic district, any and all exterior signs (and interior signage visible from the exterior, plus any exterior lighting) must be reviewed by the Historic Preservation Commission for a recommendation, with final approval by the Town Board of Trustees, considering permits, colors, textures/finish, materials, design, location, and size, per Ordinance 2025-1, Section VII (Signage); Repainting existing historic-district signage with the same color and lettering is exempted as normal maintenance and does not require Commission/Board review, per Ordinance 2025-1, Section VI; GENUINE UNRESOLVED GAP (shared with this file's historic-district-landmark-alteration-certificate entry): this session could not confirm via a primary source whether the Town Board has locally designated the full Downtown Historic District under the ordinance's own Section III designation procedure, as distinct from its separate 2014 federal/state National Register of Historic Places listing — confirm with the Town Clerk (719-655-2232) whether a specific property is currently subject to this sign-review requirement. If your project isn't listed, confirm with Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 719-655-2232 before starting work.

Saguache does not publish a plan-review timeline for this permit. Contact Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 719-655-2232 for current turnaround.

Depending on your project, Saguache may also ask for: None (Sec. 15-2-80 sidewalk-display sign rules); Alteration Certificate application (historic landmark/district signs only). See the required-documents checklist on this page for details on each.

Apply through Town of Saguache Town Hall (Town Clerk / Deputy Clerk administer Building Permit applications; no dedicated Building Department) at 504 San Juan Avenue, P.O. Box 417, Saguache, CO 81149. Phone: 719-655-2232, email: townclerk@townofsaguache.org. Office hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., per the Town Hall page as preserved by the Wayback Machine (townofsaguache.org/town-hall-546.htm, captured 2025-12-10). NOTE: as of this review's live-site check (2026-07-06), the Town's website has been migrated/rebuilt on Netlify and no longer publishes this page or most of its prior content (see sources note below); hours/contact are carried forward from the last-known-good archived capture, cross-verified independently against ColoradoEnergy.org's own listed Town Clerk contact (matches exactly: 504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232).. Official information: https://www.townofsaguache.org/.

Saguache, Colorado has adopted: NONE — ColoradoEnergy.org, a statewide Colorado building/energy code-adoption tracking directory maintained independently of any single jurisdiction, lists the Town of Saguache's Building Code status explicitly as 'No Building Codes' (coloradoenergy.org/codes/codes.aspx?City=Saguache), with a Town Clerk contact (504 San Juan Ave, Saguache, CO 81149, 719-655-2232) matching this file's independently-verified Town Hall contact exactly — confirming this listing is genuinely about the Town, not Saguache County. NOTE (2026-07-07 liveness re-check): coloradoenergy.org's HTTPS endpoint is currently hanging at the application layer, not blocked at the network layer — DNS resolves, TCP connects, and the TLS handshake completes normally (verified via a verbose curl trace), but the server accepts the HTTP request and then returns zero bytes indefinitely; plain HTTP (port 80) does eventually answer with a slow ~17s 301 redirect to the same broken HTTPS endpoint. This points to a stuck/overloaded backend on their end, not a DNS or network-path problem. Its own Wayback captures for this exact page stop at 2010, too stale to cite as current-state confirmation. The 'No Building Codes' finding is retained on the strength of the independent Town Clerk contact match above, not the ColoradoEnergy.org citation alone. Re-check coloradoenergy.org liveness in a future session.; UPDATE (2026-07-07): the Town's Municode Chapter 18 — previously flagged as unreachable (see prior note below) — was successfully read directly via a live browser render (library.municode.com/co/saguache/codes/municipal_code?nodeId=CD_ORD_CH18BURE; the site is a client-rendered SPA that returns an empty shell to plain HTTP fetches/Wayback, which is why earlier non-browser attempts failed). 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' is codified through Ordinance No. 2023-2 (enacted March 13, 2023) and contains exactly three articles, none of which adopt a model construction code: Article 1 (Sec. 18-1-10 through 18-1-90), Dangerous Buildings — an unsafe-structure abatement/demolition procedure whose text references 'the adopted building code' only as hypothetical boilerplate (comparing a damaged structure's remaining strength to what a new building would need), never naming or adopting the IBC/IRC/any specific code; Article 2 (Sec. 18-2-10 through 18-2-80), Flood Damage Prevention — a FEMA/NFIP floodplain-management ordinance adopted under Title 29 C.R.S. authority, unrelated to general construction permitting (this corrects an earlier speculative title guess of 'Field Approval,' sourced only from search-engine snippets before this chapter could actually be read); Article 3 (Sec. 18-3-10 through 18-3-50), Manufactured Homes, Mobile Homes, Mobile Home Parks and RV Parks — zoning/prohibition rules, not a construction code adoption. This directly confirms, from the Town's own primary source rather than the third-party ColoradoEnergy.org directory alone, that the Town has NOT adopted the IBC/IRC or any other model building code.; PRIOR NOTE (superseded by the UPDATE above, retained for audit trail): The Town's own currently codified Municipal Code (hosted on Municode Library, library.municode.com/co/saguache) does contain a 'CHAPTER 18 - Building Regulations' with at least an 'Article 2 - Field Approval' and an 'Article 3 - Manufactured Homes/Mobile Homes/Home Parks/Vacation Parks' (chapter/article titles confirmed via Municode's own site-indexed page titles across multiple independent search-engine queries). However, the verbatim text of Chapter 18 (including any fee schedule, permit-issuance procedure, or code-edition citation it may contain) could NOT be retrieved after exhausting every available recovery avenue: Municode's MunicodeNEXT platform serves this content exclusively via an authenticated Angular/API backend (library.municode.com/api and mcclibraryfunctions.azurewebsites.us/api both returned 401 Unauthorized to unauthenticated and referer-header requests); the Wayback Machine never captured real chapter content because Municode is a client-rendered SPA that legacy crawlers indexed as an empty shell (CDX lookups for library.municode.com/co/saguache* returned zero snapshots); Firecrawl (which can render JS) was unavailable due to exhausted account credits at time of this review; and Google/Bing search snippets surfaced only page titles, never body text, for this specific chapter.; No adopted electrical code (NEC) or plumbing code (IPC) edition was found attributable to the Town specifically; per Colorado's standard structure for small statutory towns without their own trade-permitting programs, electrical and plumbing work is presumed to fall to Colorado DORA state board licensing/permitting rather than a Town-run trade-permit program, but this file does NOT assert a Town electrical or plumbing permit process given the complete absence of any Town-published fee, form, or procedure for either trade (see localAmendments).. Local amendments apply — see the Saguache overview page for the full list.

No general sign permit exists. Outside a designated historic district or landmark, only narrow size and placement rules apply to sandwich-board signs and banners (Municipal Code Sec. 15-2-80), with no application or fee. Inside a Town-designated historic landmark, contributing structure, or historic district, signs require Historic Preservation Commission review and Board of Trustees approval under the historic preservation ordinance.

No larger than three feet by four feet, per Municipal Code Sec. 15-2-80(1).