A new item up for Little Rock City Board of Directors consideration: A “ticker tape” LED sign for the Main Street “Creative Corridor” to be placed on the Main Street Mall building at Main and Capitol.

The board is being asked to waive competitive bidding. The agenda explanation:

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This authorizes the City Manager to dispense with the requirement of competitive bids and to authorize the purchase of a “ticker tape” sign which is a wrap-around ten (10) mm LED display sign with a live area of 3’2” x 48’3”. It will be installed on the Creative Corridor’s Main Street Mall Building located at 101 East Capitol Avenue in Little Rock. The sign will be used to promote performances and other civic events much like the former sign in the front of the Robinson Auditorium. The purchase is 100% funded by an ArtPlace Foundation grant. ArtPlace is strongly encouraging the City obligate the funds by December 31, 2015, or risk losing the funding.

The ArtPlace Foundation is to pay the $86,840.60 cost. No city money is required. Bidding should be waived, the city manager said, because a local company, ACE Sign, had provided estimates for three signs “significantly less expensive than those from other vendors.” The Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau will manage the sign.

Hmmm. Could Capitol and Main become the center of things in a future Little Rock, like Times Square on New Year’s maybe? Presuming, that is, that the freeway builders’ plan to further harm downtown with more concrete doesn’t get in the way. Ever think how nice it would be if downtown was packed with people lingering after work, even walking/biking/busing home, rather than fleeing to a highway system designed — not to create community in Little Rock — but to get people home fast as possible under the law to Conway, Cabot and highway director Scott Bennett’s territory down in Saline County?

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