“Give us 12 months to tidy up.”

“We’re working on our inner beauty.”

“We may be a mess but you don’t have to be.”

These are just some of the many signs that the City of Guelph has strategically placed around town to inform frustrated Guelph citizens that the construction they have to deal with is a necessary evil. We, at The Ontarion, have noticed that this message comes with another teaching that with some careful marketing and cheerful graphic design, closed roads and inconvenience can actually be adorable and fun. Rather than exclusively placing the traditional construction signs in the necessary places, the City of Guelph thought it smarter to patronize its citizens with catchy slogans on colourful signs that are shooting for clever but fall short. Can someone say gratuitous?

Those from the city responsible for the sign campaign claim that the cheerful messages are seeking to make the inconvenienced citizen feel that their annoyance is coming as part of a larger plan. Showing them that the construction is all happening at once for a reason and is part of a larger effort towards the betterment of the city. The signs direct viewers to visit a website where they can view the plans for the city, the redirected transit routes and the cutest thing of all, share their detour stories for the chance to win a GPS system. It would appear that the city is pulling out all the stops to sooth the Guelph downtown frequenter into a calm submission to prevent them from noticing that this is not the first time that construction interfered with traffic movement downtown, that transit is going back to a flawed 30-minute service with decreased routes to accommodate the construction and that the city has spent an exorbitant amount of money to make construction fun.

According to an article on the subject of the signs in the Guelph Mercury, this adorable campaign is going to have cost the city about $324,000. Some say that the amount of construction going on necessitates the amount of money spent on the informational campaign but we at The Ontarion have a difficult time seeing the need.

Certainly it’s important to make the Guelph citizen aware that all construction projects are taking place simultaneously for good reason. It’s also important to let them know that this is part of a bigger picture, to show them the light at the end of the tunnel. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to inform transit riders of the detours to expect.

The intentions of the City of Guelph in heading up this informational campaign were entirely sound. The method is what we take issue with.

It’s altogether too cute. Treating the inconvenienced Guelph citizen like an informed and rational individual would have been favourable to trying to relax them with graphic motifs of construction pylons and flowers. Actual information would have been better to showcase rather than tongue-in-cheek messages about inner beauty and tidying up.

Next time, City of Guelph, try not to insult the intelligence of the taxpayer.

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