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Borough hopeful slams city sign |
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With only a few days left for campaigning, borough council candidate Mark McLaughlin took a brief time out Wednesday to display his dissatisfaction with the recently erected City of Sherbrooke electronic sign on College Street. 
PHOTO: AL BARBER As Borough council hopeful Mark McLaughlin publicly denounced the new City of Sherbrooke electronic sign, city employees coincidently stopped to rig up the College Street system’s lights on Wednesday.
“They couldn’t have put the sign in a more dangerous spot,” said the Fairview district councillor hopeful standing on College Street as city employees pulled up to connect the sign’s electricity. “Besides the fact that only half the population will see it and it has a tree covering half of it, this busy stretch of College, just before the train tracks, right in the middle of the student core doesn’t need another distraction.”
Outgoing borough President Doug MacAulay was out of town yesterday and could not answer any questions pertaining to the structure, but after three hours and a handful of phone calls to different individuals the Record contacted borough councillor Bill Smith who says that the structure is somewhat larger than the borough had anticipated.
“There is one in every borough,” said the councillor hoping for re-election come this weekend. “It will have a revolving (bilingual) message, like if something is going on at Uplands or Centennial for example. The message will be controlled by the borough office and will have messages of events going on in town to inform the public. It’s bigger than we had thought, what we had asked for.”
McLaughlin questions the reasoning for erecting such a sign in such a location.
“We have been fighting for years with the city and Ministry of Transport officials to make College Street safe for pedestrians and cyclists and now they add this flashing billboard. Adding a structure like this in the student section is like putting monkey bars in a park. Some students will want to climb it and how long will it be before it is broken and covered with graffiti?”
Smith disagrees with McLaughlin on the location of the sign.
When asked if he believed the sign to be in a dangerous spot, he replied: “I don’t think so. I think it’s better there than on the front lawn of the (Catholic Church). That would be an eyesore.”
One of McLaughlin’s priorities throughout his campaign has been to revive the borough’s identity and bring signs depicting ‘Lennoxville’ back to the borough, and while he is unsatisfied to see the structure sporting only a City of Sherbrooke logo, he says its positioning is of greater relevance.
“This is a safety issue and a cost issue pertaining to the maintenance of it. What if it gets broken or graffitied, who will be paying to fix it?” the candidate wants to know. “This wasn’t well thought out. We’ve missed another opportunity to have our name displayed. How many times have we been promised to get our signs back? The last time I heard of such a sign was at a council meeting (over a year ago) and my biggest concern was whether the messages would be displayed in both languages. At the time, there was no idea as to where this sign would go. That was the last time I heard anything and then it gets erected in the worst place it could possibly be.”
McLaughlin says a public consultation could have remedied this problem.
“I don’t know who made this decision. Was it our council or was it the city? Regardless, we should have been consulted on the matter. This is the wrong place to put this sign. Our elected officials are there to represent us, yes, but in situations like this the public should have been consulted,” he said “This was just a darn bad idea. That’s the problem right now, it’s decide first and consult after and we need to turn that around. In this case, everyone knows the dangers that plaque that street. Just ask Professor Craig who was hit (by a vehicle while walking a few years ago) right there.”
Smith says that while the information messages will be controlled by the borough, the structure, the maintenance and the decision to put it there was made by the city alone.
“(A Consultation) wouldn’t have made any difference. This belongs to the city, it was their decision not ours,” the Uplands District councillor stated yesterday. “It belongs to the city so they are responsible for fixing it. The borough doesn’t really own anything. Borough names are not on any of them. If you notice all city owned buildings are cleaned quickly if there is graffiti and this will be the same.”
McLaughlin is not against the intention and usefulness such a sign may provide in “helping” to keep residents informed, but he doesn’t agree with its location.
He believes the sign should stay off until a “proper” decision is rendered with safety taken into consideration, but Smith anticipates the sign’s scrolling messages to begin as early as next week.
By Jen Young
Special To The Record
2009-10-30 |
Montreal Canadiens
