Quality name boards for Colombo streets

by Ranil WIJAYAPALA

The street nameboards in the Colombo city which are now in a very bad state due to pasting of posters and lack of maintenance are to be replaced with high quality ones under a program involving the private sector and the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC).

It's a model project in association with the private sector as we view that city street nameboard, should be changed in accordance with the improvement of services and city beautification programs said CMC Special Commissioner Omar Kamil.

"The CMC belongs to every citizen of Colombo. The private sector, public sector, and civil society has a moral obligation to assist to improve the city as they profit from the city's appearance," he said.

Therefore, the CMC invited the private sector through a tender to join hands with it to install the name boards with some advertisement space on the boards to cover costs of the boards and their maintenance also.

"We made this offer twice before but there were no takers. Fortunately in 2010 we were able to make an offer to a company for installing 1,450 street nameboards within a period of three years," he said.

According to Kamil there are some parts of the city which are considered to be attractive for the private sector to have their companies advertised whilst some areas in the Colombo North, Colombo East and Colombo Central are not.

They look for areas which have very good visibility to a large number of people. That was acceptable to the Council and they have begun to install these street nameboards from the beginning of this year. We are progressing," Kamil said .

According to Kamil the city street nameboards will be made in aluminium that does not corrode.

A board will have three panels to display a street name in all three languages and these strips will have a night reflection enabling them to be read at night.

"Since a board has three strips it discourages people from pasting posters on it," he said.

The cost of the 1,450 nameboards will be around Rs. 37 million. Each street nameboard will cost about Rs. 40,000 including maintenance cost.

"We now see these street nameboards in more affluent areas. We will be able to complete installing 450 nameboards per year. The contract is for a four-year period which can be extended to another four years "he said.

The CMC gets a small fee from the contractor for each board.

We are more concerned about the expense which otherwise has to be disbursed by the Council," he said.

The Council does not have in-house capacity to install these boards on its own and the contractor is getting the boards made in one of its factories and installs them in the city.

It is free to find sponsors for each board," he said.