Keyword Text on Page?

Howdy folks! New here, seems like a sweet place. Looking for some assistance. Tried doing a search on this but can't even think of what to search for...

Redoing a site for a small storage company and they have this huge list of cities and zips all over the bottom of their index page...When I asked why I was told this...

"The zips and cities are there for searches....When our present page was done every keyword needed to be on the Home page. That why the zips and cities were there."

Here is a link to my photobucket screenie of the list: URL

Now I know that engines crawl text on a page but is this list going to really help at all? They are REALLLLLY picky about being first in searches and I would like to be able to convince them this list isn't needed. Any suggestions? cause dang, this list is ugly to have on the page and visitors are probably pretty confused by it .

Listing so many key words on the home page will do nothing for their position. They would be better building a seperate page for each one, with some relevant unique information. Or even better, put it into a database and generate each page with the cities and zips.

i agree with dominoman,

would be better with many pages each optimised for that location...