Regional Buffet Authority Hosts ‘Decompression Brunch’ for Retired Yard-Sign Volunteers

The Regional Buffet Authority hosted its first “Decompression Brunch” for retired yard-sign volunteers Thursday, honoring 120 men and women who spent the campaign season planting, straightening, and ultimately removing corrugated plastic across the county.

“These volunteers gave their backs, their weekends, and in several cases their friendships with neighbors,” said Authority Chairwoman Gloria Hensley, welcoming the group to a banquet hall decorated with what she called “retired signs, repurposed with love” — yard signs flipped blank-side-out and painted with messages like THANK YOU and SIT DOWN, YOU’VE EARNED IT. “Today, we feed them.”

The brunch menu was engineered for recovery. The gravy bar — a veteran of the authority’s Election-Recovery Comfort Station — anchored the spread, flanked by a made-to-order omelet station, a pancake griddle “the size of a campaign promise,” and a dessert table featuring what Hensley called “the official pie of closure”: pecan, a nod to Precinct 7’s decisive bake-sale victory.

“I planted 400 signs,” said volunteer Ray Delgado, 67, loading his third plate. “I straightened 400 signs after the wind. I removed 400 signs in the rain. My lower back has filed for retirement. This brunch is the first thing all season that was done for me instead of by me.”

The program included an awards ceremony. Honors included the Golden Stake (most signs planted: 612, by Marge Ellison, 71), the Wind Warrior citation (most signs re-straightened after storms), and the coveted Empty Lawn Award, presented to the volunteer team that achieved full sign removal within six hours of the deadline — “a time,” Hensley noted, “that beat the Enforcement Unit’s own projection.”

The brunch’s emotional peak came during the “sign burning” — a ceremonial bonfire, fully permitted, in which volunteers fed one splintered, rain-warped sign each into the flames. “It’s not about the candidates,” said volunteer coordinator Dana Whitfield, watching the fire. “It’s about letting go. The season is over. The lawns are empty. We are free.”

Marge Ellison, 71, winner of the Golden Stake for 612 signs planted, gave a tearful acceptance speech. “People ask why,” she said. “I tell them: the signs don’t plant themselves. Somebody has to do it. That somebody was me. Six hundred and twelve times, that somebody was me.” The sign-burning bonfire required three permits, two fire marshals, and one noise variance for what Whitfield called “the ceremonial crackling.” “It was worth it,” she said. “You could feel the closure. It smelled like closure. Closure smells like burning corrugated plastic.”

Hensley confirmed the Decompression Brunch will become an annual tradition, held every November. “The signs will return,” she said. “They always return. But so will the brunch. And the gravy. The gravy is forever.”