MAUMELLE, Ark – Down the road, drivers are used to seeing speed limit signs and right of ways, but a new billboard in Maumelle has people pumping the brakes to take a second look.

“We were tagged in it pretty much within minutes of it going up,” Courtney Mixon who opposes the billboard said.

The ad shows a pit bull chained up with their teeth out and across the top, it reads “Pit bulls kill.”

“Who would spend that much money to put that billboard up? To fear monger people into believing all these dogs are vicious,” Mixon asked.

The billboard is an attempt to re-enact the city’s ban on the breed. Paid for anonymously, it asks drivers to call the mayor with a direct line to his office.

“The average person that reaches out to me, thinks I put the billboard up,” Maumelle Mayor Caleb Norris said.

Norris says he’s frustrated having to explain himself but says whoever put the ad up had every right to do so.

“A billboard critiquing an elected official is about as American as apple pie, right? It’s supposed to happen,” Norris said.

The City of Maumelle lifted its ban on pit bulls back in 2021, replacing it instead with a set of ordinances focused on behavior of all dogs.

Norris says he thought it was a discussion long past.

“That issue has kind of come and gone,” Norris said.

Now it’s circling back and getting people in the city to talk again.

“It’s not just this type of dog that just attacks only, there’s labs, there’s huskies, there’s poodles,” Mixon said.

Others who didn’t want to go on camera said they agree with the billboard.

Right now, Norris says the city council has no plans to discuss putting the ban back in place.