A giant, glowing yellow sign will soon rise outside Buc-ee’s in Bastrop.

The Bastrop City Council Tuesday night unanimously approved a 70-foot high pylon sign for the College Station-based business after the city’s Municipal Sign Review Board in 2013 denied the request.

The board’s chair, Dan Hays Clark, said the committee had been trying to keep a level playing field, after previously denying variances to other businesses along the highway.

"You have to treat everyone the same," Clark said Tuesday. Bastrop’s sign ordinance places height limits for highway signs at 35 feet and restricts their area to 135 square-feet.

The sign the council approved Tuesday night will measure 70 feet high and 314 square-feet around, doubling the height and sign square footage allowed under the city’s current rules. The circular sign with the iconic smiling beaver at the touristy gas station will read "Bastrop" and tower over a planned overpass at the Texas 71 and 95 intersection.

Buc-ee’s representatives argued the business needed high signage so that drivers could see their road signs from the fast-moving highway.

A newly constructed overpass along Texas 71 at Tahitian Drive and one under construction at the highway’s intersection with Texas 95 complicate the issue.

"The elevation of 71 changed the game," Stan Beard, director of real estate for Buc-ee’s, said Tuesday. "What we are asking for basically is the ability to be seen for any westbound traffic from 71. You would not know there was a Buc-ee’s there unless you knew there was a Buc-ee’s there."

Council members agreed and directed city staff to present an amended sign ordinance to the planning commission in the coming weeks that would allow for taller, larger signs to be constructed along fast-moving freeways like Texas 71.

Still, others urged the council not to grant any variances or change sections of the code until an entire review of the sign ordinance could be completed — something officials ordered back in August.

Bastrop resident and business owner Bill Pletsch told the council Tuesday night that a number of cities had been pushing for smaller signs.

"Everything is moving the other way — and we want to go up," he said.

Council Member Kay McAnally agreed that the city’s form-based code veers away from tall signs in favor of smaller, more discrete advertising.

"That is the progressive way that towns are moving," McAnally said. "They are trying to keep them beautiful."

A number of businesses, including those not along the highway, have complained about the 42-page draconian sign ordinance and how difficult it is to comply with its stipulations.

Council Member Gary Schiff has been heading up a full review of the ordinance, but in light of the numbered complaints from businesses along Texas 71, officials thought it was important to go ahead and green-light elevated signs along the highway before changing the entire document.

Buc-ee’s did not say when it planned to construct its newly approved sign.

Changes to the city’s sign ordinance will return to the council in the coming months.