Roger Goldingay of Mississippi Marketplace calls the posters for bands, garage sales and missing puppies that pile up on utility poles near the location of his food-cart pod “eye-level trash.”

But one of the business owner’s neighbors on North Mississippi Avenue, where posters on utility poles have become the new duct tape on sidewalks, couldn’t disagree more.

“I call them cultural-exchange kiosks,” says Jim Brunberg, co-owner of Mississippi Studios, who says he does not use poles to promote his concerts but thinks others should have that opportunity. “It’s a time-honored American tradition to post on public utility poles.”

Their debate—which has now made its way to City Hall—emerged from a seemingly benign neighborhood clean-up day Saturday, Sept. 12.

Organized by Portland’s Office of Neighborhood Involvement, the Boise Neighborhood Association and the Historic Mississippi Avenue Business Association, the clean-up day aimed to rid Mississippi Avenue of graffiti.

But because the dozen community volunteers lacked permission from some property owners along Mississippi Avenue, they couldn’t spruce up all the buildings with graffiti along the street. Instead, they spent some of their time cleaning what they considered nuisances in the public right-of-way.

As a result, one group of five ROTC cadets spent over an hour peeling posters from a single utility pole. A few other groups worked on a couple of other poles.

The groups were so proud of what they did, they sent an email to businesses in the Mississippi Avenue area extolling their efforts.

The backlash that followed surprised at least one of the organizers.

“I don’t see why anyone would be upset by cleaning poles,” says Sarah Shaoul, owner of Black Wagon children’s store, a Mississippi Avenue business that helped with the clean-up.

Brunberg and several other business owners responded with long emails of their own, saying they don’t see anything wrong with the posters.

In an email to Commissioner Amanda Fritz (who oversees the Office of Neighborhood Involvement) and Mayor Sam Adams on Sept. 16, Brunberg likened the clean-up of poles to an attack on his neighborhood’s character.

He asked city leaders to intervene. And, to inspire them, he promoted the idea of new community bulletin boards in areas with high foot traffic “rather than the reactionary, near-vigilante fervor with which the poles/posters are now being attacked.”

As of Tuesday, Sept. 22, the mayor had not responded to Brunberg. But Fritz had. She indicated she might be willing to support bulletin boards but stopped short of calling posters on utility poles art.

“The difference between graffiti and art is permission by the property owner to the person wishing to add materials to a surface,” Fritz wrote in an email to Brunberg. “Both graffiti and pole postering are done without permission of the property owner.”

Meantime, the debate remains alive on Mississippi.

“I know a good percentage of the Mississippi business community thinks the posters are ‘cool’ and a way for bands to communicate and advertise,” says Goldingay. “Like the graffiti that becomes invisible because it’s been there so long you don’t notice it, the pole-postering damages the community in a much deeper way than just being eye-level trash.”