Edmonton-City of Champions- Oops

Our city was vandalized today. At various entrances to the municipality, the signs that welcome people to the city with the slogan”City of Champions” was changed.Those signs were written in the time when both our teams, Edmonton Oilers and Edmonton Eskimos both won the championships for hockey and football respectively.  It has been discussed  by city council and the public that these signs are old and out of date.

Listening to the radio, the big news locally was that the signs at city limits were  covered with painted boards in the same style, but with new slogans, such as  “City of Potholes”, “City of Construction,” “City of Speed Traps” and  “Suck it Calgary.” Regarding the last sign, I don’t believe we hate Calgary that much, we have a huge rivalry between the fans of the city’s teams.

Whoever did this, whether an individual or a group, were well-organized and did a professional job, covered up the signs with plywood and letters that matched the original style and were glued and then screwed in on top of the old ones,

I am sorry that I did not happen to drive that way with my camera and get a shot of one of the signs to display in this blog.

The city administration was incensed as were some citizens but the city work crews moved quickly to remove the signs and apparently it will take some “buffing up”  but the damage isn’t too serious, according to some reports. There were lots of comments from radio listeners,  and some called in to say the people should be thrown into jail, or sentenced to community service for six months. One listener called to say it cost a lot more in taxes for the city to discuss the issue than it would for repairs. Most were having a good chuckle, the announcers and myself included.

Yes, it is vandalism and perhaps signs could have been leaned up against the existing ones, causing less damage, all suggestions that I have heard on the radio, All being said and done, this vandalism is timely – we have cloudy grey days, forecasts for snow and we have a civic election looming-we could use a laugh.