Downtown Lawrence won’t soon go the way of electron-saturated Times Square.

The Lawrence City Commission on Tuesday quickly and unanimously rejected a proposal to allow advertisements to be projected, slideshow style, on the sides of downtown buildings.

“This is basically a billboard by other means,” Commissioner David Dunfield said. “I don’t want more billboards on our landscape.”

The proposal came from Mike Gleason, a Kansas City, Mo., businessman who said the projected advertisements would save advertising costs for small businesses.

“More or less, it’s a glorified projector,” he told the Lawrence City Commission. “We don’t physically change any structure or part of the building at all. We only project light on the side of the building.”

Amie Redington, a member of the Downtown Lawrence Inc. board of directors, said her organization hadn’t discussed its opinion of the proposal.

City staffers said the proposal appeared to contradict several parts of Lawrence’s sign code; they suggested commissioners send the matter to city advisory boards to revise the code if they wanted to approve the advertisements.

City Manager Mike Wildgen said the Thai House, 724 Mass., which projects its own advertisements on the sidewalk out front, was exempted from the prohibition because the projector was inside the building.

6News video: Projection advertising not coming to downtown

Mayor Mike Rundle opposed the new proposal.

“I’d hate to distract drivers any more than they are already,” he said. “If there’s a clamor for this in the community, I’d be inclined to put it through the review process, but I’m not inclined to support it at this time.”