Managing Billboards in Downtown

One of the projects that I worked on involved screening the advertisements that could go on the City owned billboards in Downtown Phoenix. This was an interesting project where I learnt a lot. Certain types of messages promoting local economy such as “Shop Phoenix” requires coming together of multiple departments such as the economic development department, public information office, and accounting department.

The reason for the involvement of multiple is to ensure delivery of inoffensive, politically unbiased and non discriminatory messages to mass. While involvement of multiple departments provides the necessary checks and balances, the entire process of generating public friendly messages becomes extremely time consuming. This raises an important dilemma about government sacrificing efficiency for social equity. In my opinion, people in local government should be ever evolving and try to strike the balance between equity and efficiency depending on the situation.