The election has been over for weeks, but those political signs that seemingly crowd every corner are just now coming down — in large part, thanks to the city, not the candidates who put them up.
“Since May 20th of this year, before the primary as a group we’ve removed close to 25,00 signs and then today’s citywide sweep we’ll probably get another couple hundred, so we’ll be close to 3,000 when it’s all said and done through this campaign season,” Jorge Espinoza, a code inspector with the city of Scottsdale, told ABC15.
During every election season, cities across the valley hit the streets to collect the thousands of political signs that either violated city code or were left behind after the election ended.
ABC15 spoke with someone who is hired by candidates to put up their signs, but he said oftentimes they don’t hire them to take them down.
"There's a little game in the office to see who collects the most,” Espinoza said.”
It’s not just a problem in Scottsdale, but cities across the valley. Mesa code compliance director Angelica Guevara told ABC15 in a statement that “some of the campaigns picked up their signs by the deadline of November 20, but unfortunately, many had not,” adding that “Due to that, we had to send our code officers on Thursday, November 21st to sweep the city picking up the remaining signs.”
We asked the City of Scottsdale why it doesn’t issue any citations or fines to try and prevent candidates from leaving their signs out for public employees to collect, the city said in a statement that its goal is to achieve “voluntary compliance,” adding that the city clerk instead sends out reminders to candidates of the deadline to remove the signs, which has led to an improvement.
“We haven’t fined anybody as of yet, we try to educate them first and they’ll comply,” Espinoza said.
Candidates could start putting up signs 71 days before the primary election, which was on July 30th. The candidates who were unsuccessful then had 15 days after the primary to remove them, and again, another 15 days after the general election.
The signs collected by the City of Scottsdale are stored in a container, where candidates have 30 days to come pick them up, after that they are recycled.
