On an average drive through Hillsborough County, you're likely to see hundreds, if not thousands of road signs.
It turns out, two men are in charge of making nearly all of signs ... from scratch.
Chris DeMay has been making road signs for the county for only the last couple months. Before that, he was a sign installer, actually planting the signs in the ground.
He likes this role more.
“I'm in the AC, man. I love it,” DeMay said. “I'm gonna love it even more here in July, August.”
DeMay is a signs marking fabricator technician. He and Gino Marzano are in charge of making thousands of signs for the county. The cities in Hillsborough County, like Tampa and Temple Terrace, have their own sign departments.
Marzano says between the two of them, they average between 1,000 and 1,200 signs made per month.
And that number ramps up dramatically when a major storm or hurricanes blows signs away.
"First thing you're going to do is go through every intersection, every city, every street, and make sure we got our stop signs up,” Marzano said. “Once you get the stop signs, then you go to the other signs, street markers, speed limits, school signs."
Following Hurricane Ian in 2022, Marzano said they fulfilled around 1,700 work orders within a 10-day period.
“When you make a whole bunch of signs, and you put them out there and they all come out and they look good, it's a good feeling,” Marzano said. “And knowing that what we do actually helps people, and it makes the community look better.”
He says the price and time it takes to make one sign varies, depending on the material needed and the amount of colors needed .
The workshop is responsible for roughly 98% of the signs in the county, according to Marzano.
DeMay says the job has changed what he's looking at when he's on some of his drives outside the county.
"Now it's one of those things where I'll be in another county or state for that matter and be like, ‘Oh, well, that's wrong,’ ” DeMay said. “You know, I'll start pointing it out, and I never did that. I never paid attention any kind of sign before I started here."
The men hope a new ink jet printer they're getting next month will speed up the process even more.
Both of DeMay's parents worked for Hillsborough County when he was growing up, so he might have been destined for this overlooked line of work.
Let's call it a "sign."
