When the owner of the Inland Octopus Toy Store in Walla Walla wanted to put a new sign on the front of his store in 2010, he showed his plan to the City planning department. He was told that his pro- posed sign - a mural showing a cartoon-like image of an octopus - at the size he wanted to paint it would violate the city's sign code.

Over Labor Day weekend that year, he put it up any- way.

After numerous legal challenges, and even more nu- merous newspaper articles reporting on them, the sign- owner lost his final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last month. So last week the City of Walla Walla had the sign painted over, and they slapped the owner with fines of about $90,000.

The Octopus owner created a lot of trouble for code enforcers in Walla Walla and took up a lot of their time. He also got a ton of free publicity (though maybe not $90,000 worth).

But he makes a good point that perhaps other signs in the area are out of compliance but the city isn't enforc- ing the sign codes in those cases. Add to that the gush of support the Octopus sign received from local "letter to the editor" writers, and it all adds up to a headache for planners.

In his column on this page, our publisher talks about complaints from downtown Waitsburg businesses about the smell coming from the roasting operations of Dyer Straits Coffee. Local city officials are grappling with that.

Welcome to the wonderful world of municipal plan- ning.

As reported on our front page this week, Columbia County has hired Kim Lyonnais as its new planner. He replaces Rich Hendricksen, who is retiring. Lyonnais has worked for the past six months as planner for the City of Dayton.

Before that, Lyonnais worked for fifteen years previ- ously as Columbia County Planner, and then for about five years as Walla Walla's city planner. (He was on duty the day the Octopus's owner came calling.)

Plans are being put together that will call for Lyon- nais to be director of a joint planning office serving both Columbia County and the City of Dayton. We view this as a good idea.

But we don't envy local planners. Their main job is to keep all of us from annoying each other.

A lot of us want to live in nice neighborhoods, with no noisy businesses nearby. And we want to live in a town that looks neat and tidy, and doesn't have buildings or signs that are out of place for their surroundings.

But we also hate it when the government tells us what to do. (Though we're less concerned when the govern- ment tells our neighbor what to do.)

We applaud the City of Dayton and Columbia County for working toward a combined planning agency that will serve all of the people of Columbia County.