Council hears, ignores safety reports on electronic billboards

In the :Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due Department, when the City Council was alerted that studies existed that indicated electronic billboards might be more of a safety hazard than a valuable source of information, council members paused in their rush to install the dang things and asked the staff to look into this.

Last night, Mario Perez, who, according to the council’s agenda, has the title of "building official," reported back on three such studies of electronic billboards and reported that, indeed, two of them did label them a safety hazard and one said they were OK. (Interestingly, something Perez did not mention is that one of the studies found that electronic billboards were such a hazard that they were banned.)

The council listened to all this and then completely changed the subject by debating whether electronic billboards would provide valuable advertising opportunities for the city and/or whether permitting electronic billboards would allow the city to get rid of a sufficient number of static ones.

So much for safety.

But, as it turns out, the whole discussion might be moot because Perez dropped the big bombshell at the end of the 37-minute discussion: no one is really interested in putting up another electronic billboard in our neighborhood anyway.