Graffiti News

There’s the big green sign on Interstate 35E in downtown Dallas that used to simply point to Waco, but is now coated in black enamel.There are the light poles and traffic signals in East Dallas covered with spray-painted tags.

Street markers in Oak Cliff bear the logos and wordmarks of gangs.

So while Dallas City Hall says it has effectively declared war on graffiti, organizing public “wipe-outs” and offering homeowners more resources than ever to clean up unwanted scrawl, officials are struggling to keep their own property free from defacement.

“We have a plethora of graffiti on so many signs in our neighborhood. It doesn’t present a good image, and the city needs to come up with a systematic way to remove it,” said Veletta Forsythe Lill, an East Dallas resident who served on the Dallas City Council for eight years.

The city primarily relies on residents to report complaints to City Hall through its 311 service line. Residents are apt to do so if it’s their wall or door or fence that’s been tagged.

But only the more die-hard neighborhood activists are inclined to catalog graffiti on property that isn’t their own, leaving city officials to largely fend for themselves when it comes to city assets.

Dallas, to be sure, isn’t small – about 385 square miles in size. And most Dallas officials agree that the city’s code enforcement department, although growing, remains understaffed and under-funded.

That doesn’t excuse unsightly tags and gang lettering remaining in plain sight for months at a time, some City Council members agreed.

“There’s always room for improvement. We need to do a better job,” said District 11 council member Linda Koop, chairwoman of the council’s transportation and environment committee.

“Our city people are up and down streets every day, but they can’t be everywhere. We need the public to be our eyes and ears,” said District 2 council member Pauline Medrano, chairwoman of the council’s quality of life and government services committee.

City Manager Mary Suhm acknowledges that the city has its share of graffiti clean-up issues and is seeking to improve response.

The city is all put powerless, however, when it comes to property that falls within Dallas’ city limits but is administered by another governmental agency, such as Dallas Area Rapid Transit or the state, Ms. Suhm notes.

The state in particular has failed to effectively remove graffiti from its properties, which generally include highways and the signs, lights and bridges over and around them.

“I’d just like them to better maintain their own property,” Ms. Suhm said.

District 12 council member Ron Natinsky is more blunt in his assessment of the Texas Department of Transportation’s graffiti cleanup performance.

“We need to send a clear message to TxDOT that we won’t take this lying down. I don’t think anyone is happy with the maintenance issues, and if they say they don’t have the money, then they’re mismanaging the resources they have,” Mr. Natinsky said.

Randy Black, a TxDOT spokesman, said his agency is doing the best it can to clear graffiti, given its limited financial resources.

But if the city is unhappy with TxDOT’s graffiti clean-up performance, it hasn’t made it clear enough.

“I want them to show me where they’ve contacted me three, four months ago and we didn’t respond,” Mr. Black said. “We take complaints of graffiti very seriously.”

If, for example, TxDOT property is tagged with a swastika or racial epithet, “we’ll remove it in a day,” Mr. Black said.

For more garden-variety graffiti, TxDOT typically waits until five or six examples of graffiti are identified within a general area before dispatching crews to remove it. Otherwise, removal isn’t cost effective, Mr. Black said.

Some graffiti cleaning jobs are easier than others, he noted.

An easily accessible highway retaining wall might only require a small crew in one truck, whereas a large directional sign over a highway could require more than a dozen people, the involvement of Dallas police and the closure of busy freeway lanes. Newer signs are coated with a surface that allows workers to wash off graffiti, but older signs may require removal or off-site repair, Mr. Black said.

“And if it’s down in the Canyon/Mixmaster, it’s a huge security and safety issue,” Mr. Black said.

One realm that City Hall and TxDOT acknowledged they could improve together: communication.

If a Dallas resident calls Dallas’ 311 hotline to report graffiti on state property, Mr. Black said, the city doesn’t forward the message to him.

Likewise, if someone complains to the state about graffiti on city property, the state has no automatic mechanism in place to notify Dallas officials, city officials say.

Meanwhile, the graffiti, regardless of whose property it’s on, stays put.

[Via:www.dallasnews.com]