The operation which started at 9pm was conducted by its Licensing Department, Enforcement and Safety as well as the Planning and Development departments.

The billboards were situated at KM17.8 and KM18.1 along the New Klang Valley Expressway (NKVE) as well as another in Jalan SS24/9.

According to MBPJ public relations officer Zainun Zakaria, the operation took some seven hours to complete as there were only a handful of workers from the contractor company at the site.

The same number of workers had to go from one location to another, and one billboard took close to two hours to complete depending on its size.

“The billboards had violated the MBPJ Advertisement Bylaws by not obtaining a proper licence,” said Zainun.

She added that MBPJ conducted such operations, on average twice a week.

At present, the council said 61 illegal billboards had been identified and 23 had been taken down.

During the council’s full board meeting earlier, Petaling Jaya mayor Datuk Mohamad Roslan Sakiman said the contractors would be allowed to recycle the steel from the billboards they tore down.

Under the current practice, the debris from the torn-down billboards including the steel are kept by the council at its store temporarily before they are disposed of.

Roslan said that in a move to hasten the process of tearing down illegal billboards, the council would hire more contractors.

Councillor Derek Fernandez suggested that the council allowed the contractors to keep the steel from demolished billboards as this would expedite the process of taking down the billboards, a method used by Kuala Lumpur City Hall.