A decision by the citys engineering department in 2009 to reduce staff and funding for its anti-graffiti program has consequently resulted in a spike in graffiti across the city, city council heard Tuesday.
Though light poles and electrical power boxes continued to be wiped clean of graffiti for the past two years, the magnitude of graffiti showing up on buildings and city structures overwhelmed the citys main anti-graffiti contractor, Goodbye Graffiti.
They couldnt keep up with the demand, said Jerry Dobrovolny, the citys director of engineering services and transportation, after speaking to council about bolstering the anti-graffiti program. What we discovered as we ratcheted down, the problems started to resurface. What we know now is the level that were at now absolutely isnt enough. We know weve seen the problem come back and were ratcheting back up to where we saw it working in the past.
What that means is adding more staff and educating more city staff, particularly property use and bylaw inspectors, on tackling the citys graffiti problem. It also means dedicating two Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»police officers to enforcement.
The new costs to the program for this year is estimated at $150,000, with the overall funding request for the 2012 budget expected to be between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, Dobrovolny said.
The rationale to cut back on the anti-graffiti program in 2009 was based on observations that the graffiti problem had been reduced from the late 1990s, when the city was known as a destination spot in Canada for taggers.
Those are part of the tough decisions we have every year in the budget process, Dobrovolny said. Theres a whole variety of difficult cuts to put up, and this is one of them. Each of them has major ramifications.
With social media, including Facebook, now a popular means for communication, city officials are worried taggers will use the Internet to draw attention to their work in a city seen as lax on graffiti enforcement.
The danger is, when they start to report out to the rest of the world that so-and-so has been doing graffiti, and they start posting all these images and nobody is being arrested, nobody is being taken to task for it or held accountable, then that message starts to get out, said Kristina Copeland, the citys former anti-graffiti program coordinator. And were starting to see some of those graffiti writers from across Canada coming back and they are becoming active here again.
Also key to tackling the graffiti problem is the so-called community paint-outs, where the city supplies paint to residents and business operators to paint over graffiti in their neighbourhoods. The city has also had success in getting taggers to paint city-sanctioned murals.
COPE Coun. David Cadman said he favours the mural program over paint-outs, pointing out that painting over graffiti simply provides another canvas for taggers. Murals are a feature and accent of the city that should be promoted and celebrated, he said.
As I look around the city and see these murals, I see very few of them have been tagged [by graffiti writers], Cadman said. Theres kind of a respect of artists for artists. Whereas Ive seen buildings that have been painted over and literally within two or three days, the graffiti is back.
Council heard that it takes at least 10 days before an artist can be given approval to paint on a structure in the city. Thats because area businesses and residents have to be consulted.
Copeland and Dobrovolny said they understood Cadmans concern about providing a new canvas for taggers. But Copeland pointed out her experience with paint-outs, particularly in Kitsilano, has curbed the tagging problem.
You will absolutely start to reduce the number of subsequent tags, and in some cases, we have laneways that were building for building covered in graffiti that are completely graffiti-free a year-and-a-half later, she said. It is absolutely effective.
There are an estimated 200 murals in the city, many of which are catalogued on the citys website. A map and audio guide on murals in the Downtown Eastside is expected to be added to the website.
Twitter: @Howellings
