ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — It’s been weeks since the City of Albuquerque unveiled a flashy new welcome sign near the Convention Center downtown. However, shortly after it was installed, multiple letters stopped lighting up.

“It’s a great looking sign, I love it, it’s definitely one of the things that I am most proud of since I started working at Zeon,” said Dillon Gialouris, Zeon Signs project manager.

Recently, parts of the sign have gone dark. The $60,000 sign has only been up for a month and now cars driving down Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue at night are only seeing part of the sign.

The city’s Department of Municipal Development says they hired a contractor, Dalkia Energy Solutions, to inspect it. The city told KOB 4 that the contractor told them on Friday the sign is in working condition.

But we have multiple pictures going back to March 17 showing otherwise. KOB 4 asked the city for more information about the issues, but they said in an email they are trying to reach out to the contractor.

So, we went straight to the signs manufacturer, Zeon Signs. They told us they have a couple of theories as to what could cause this outage.

“We assume it’s a transformer, which would mean it’s a little box on there that needs to be swapped out,” Gialouris said. “It might have had a failure there which is why it is burnt out in a line and not multiple units.”

But there could be a larger problem.

“There is a low chance that it’s a piece of the neon that went out that also caused it to burn out in a row like Christmas lights used to do, where if one went out 4 or 5 would go out in a row, but that’s a much smaller chance,” Gialouris said.

They won’t know for sure until they can get a closer look this weekend

Gialouris adds they are scheduled to inspect the sign at 8 a.m. Saturday morning. If it’s a transformer issue, they can fix it within an hour or two. But if it’s the neon that went out, it will take a few more days to replace.