NAC Editorial Board: Stop signs as manhole covers makes so much sense that it needs to become official city policy.

Photo credit: WDRB

As we await the mayor's official comment on the matter, which is slated to arrive in Navajo code after the election, as conveyed by an extinct breed of carrier pigeon, the use of a stop sign to cover a manhole after last Friday's flash floods has been the target of considerable mirth, allowing Louisville metro residents yet another opportunity to laugh at us.

WDRB reports on the situation here.

City Hall trots out an employee to rationalize here, as Warren typically Naps.

However, as Monty Python once advised, we need to look at the bright side of life. Whomever decided to recycle a stop sign by substituting it for a manhole cover actually showed rare improvisational skill as it pertains to problem solving, especially if it was torn from an adjacent signpost, because after all -- who even pays attention to warped, faded stop signs when navigating New Albany's one-way, high-speed street grid?

Surely the employee reasoned: How can it be bad to appropriate emergency band-aids from one shambolic use of the city's neglected infrastructure to temporarily address another?

Far from vilifying the practice, we need to adapt it as standard procedure. Dan Coffey can head the Department of  Patching Crap with Crap.

He'd simply nail it -- and not at all metaphorically.

Much as we never knew we were being rebranded as a city with a marketing tactic in the form of a new civic logo, the recreation of this symbolic manhole-cum-stop sign act might top future Harvest Homecoming parade floats, and go viral on YouTube. It could be re-enacted at every Mayor's Prayer Breakfast.

The current occupant might even borrow it as yet another indication of his city being Fundamentally Better (at self-serving propaganda).

Verily, the sky's the limit, folks. Let's not waste this gift.

What can you repair with the stop sign on YOUR corner?