Mayor of Paphos Phedonas Phedonos is ruffling feathers in his determined campaign to beautify the city and do away with the ‘eyesore’ of illegal billboards, it emerged on Wednesday.

Speaking on CyBC’s morning programme, Phedonas elaborated on the reasons behind the push for a clean-up, charging that the situation with illegal boards and billboards, particularly around Paphos Airport, and at the entrance to the city off the highway, had been anarchic for years.

“Beyond the fact that they ruin the image of the city the matter of illegality is a grave one and cannot be tolerated,” Phedonas said.

The mayor added that a handful of large companies operate the billboards without paying for permits, depriving the municipalities of revenues due to them.

Additionally, some make tens of thousands of euros of profit annually, through undeclared rental payments to landowners, or through circumvention of the Turkish Cypriot property management rules, he said.

The same companies that carry out these illegal practices advertise large developers’ projects and political candidates for office, he said.

Eastern Paphos [Geroskipou] municipality Mayor Nikos Palios for his part, speaking on the same programme, said Phedonas had overstepped his bounds by trying to impose the clean-up on the neighbouring municipality.

The area around the airport and up to the entrance to the city of Paphos belongs to Geroskipou, he said.

Phedonas dispelled the Geroskipou mayor’s claim, saying that no foreign or domestic visitor could make a distinction between the boundaries of the two municipalities and that first impressions were of a place infested with ugly billboards.

Phedonas has been outspoken about the illegal billboards since the matter broke in early September, following the announcement of the Med9 leadership summit to be held in Tsada, in Paphos district on October 11.

In previous statements to media, Phedonas rubbished notions that the imminent arrival of the dignitaries was his only motivation and pointed out that, in addition to their blatant illegality, environmental and road safety considerations were also at play since no assessment had been made of the impacts of the all-night light pollution the billboards emit.

In his own municipality, all such illegal installations, large and small, had been removed during the course of his term, Phedonas added. This amounted to 1,400 boards over the past nine years, he said.

The mayor also rubbished rebuttals claiming a “lack of clarity”, due to the local government restructure, over who has the legal authority to take down the boards.

Removal can be legally undertaken by any of three services, Phedonas said, which are all covered by relevant legislation.

These are the self-governance organisations [EOAs] via planning and permitting laws; the municipalities; or the roads and public works department.

Despite the fact that the Paphos EOA has no working crew staff at present to tackle the task, the mayor said he had offered his own crew for the purpose.