SELMA – After responding to dozens of instances of graffiti around the city in the last six months, the Selma public works department is looking for ways to not just abate graffiti, but stop it altogether.
Mayor Scott Robertson had previously requested that city staff bring a discussion item to the council on the possibility of creating a graffiti task force to address the issue. At the council’s Aug. 19 meeting, staff and council members discussed the city’s needs and the obstacles that have kept it from eliminating the vandalism; the council ultimately decided to look into budgeting funds to help with graffiti abatement.
“We should have zero tolerance for what brings our town down,” Robertson said. “It doesn’t make it look good, because we work hard for what we have, and we want to set a good example for our kids, for our next generation.”
Public Works Director Michael Honn explained to the council what his department has been doing to clean up graffiti. He said the city logged 45 work orders for graffiti abatement in the first six months of the year, and while the department responds to reports of graffiti as soon as possible, more will pop up in the same area shortly after it is cleaned.
“This is an ongoing thing that we deal with on a daily basis, but we are taking down the graffiti as it’s coming in,” Honn said.
Public works staff and code enforcement officers clean walls and signs as they receive work orders or see graffiti around the city, and they also help residents obtain the materials they need to clean graffiti on their private property, Honn said.
The city has also worked out a deal with the local Home Depot, where the store will donate up to five gallons of paint a month to the city, in whatever color the city requests. This helped one resident — who was willing to do the work himself but could not afford paint — clean up graffiti on his fence, Honn said.
“The problem is, is that we had to have that specially mixed by Home Depot,” Honn said. “They were more than willing to do that for us, because it wasn’t a standard color — white, black, brown, beige — it was an olive green color. So we already ran into a situation where we’ve gotten the paint donated, and he’s painted it, and they come (back) as soon as you paint that. Mr. Mayor, it’s like a canvas.”
Honn said city staff think it would be better to create a policy that limits the colors of paint it will provide to residents, either in general or after the second or third time private property is vandalized. Staff are also considering guidelines for new developments that restrict the colors used for fences and walls. This would allow the city to combat graffiti in a more efficient manner, Honn said.
“It’ll be a little easier, I think, to enforce once we instate that policy internally, because then we can go and say, ‘This is the city’s policy. We’ve given you paint two or three times. We can’t do it no more, so pick one of these three colors’,” Honn said.
Further, public works is working with the city engineer and the community development department to look into ways it can mandate more “cover” on graffiti targets in new developments. For example, Honn said that the city would require cinder block walls that separate neighborhoods to have shrubbery in front of them, which limits the access vandals have to the surface.
Council members and residents said they were in support of that idea, but they also want a way for residents to come together and address graffiti on their own without needing to get the city involved. That way, they can address graffiti on private property and possibly abate it sooner than city employees would be able to.
Councilmember Sarah Guerra suggested putting together a fund for graffiti abatement that would budget money for paint that the city can provide to residents. Because the discussion was an information item only, Robertson then requested and received consensus for a future agenda item for the council to consider allocating $2,500 to graffiti abatement.
