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HomeMy WebLinkAbout02-Mayor's Office C!~Y OF SAN BERtC)RbINO - REQUEST lOR COUNCIL ACTION t, r From: Mayor Holcomb Subject: Consider adopting business license differential for the sale of spray paint and felt tip markers Dept: Date: January 9, 1992 Synopsis of Previous Council action: Recommended motion: That the City Attorney be instructed to prepare an ordinance establishing a business license differential, in the amount of $ , for businesses that sell spray paint and felt tip markers. ./ Contact person: Mayor Holcomb Phone: 5133 Supporting data attached: Yes Ward: FUNDING REQUIREMENTS: Amount: Source: (Acct. No.! (Acct. DescriPtion) Finance: Council Notes: 75-0262 Agenda Item No ;)... Engulted inaSeaof Spr~y Paint . Los Angeles' anti-graftid programs have made some breakthroughs, but many residents see the battle as a hopeless one. The visual blight is taking a toll on the citY's psyche. By SHERYL STOLBERG TIMES STAFF WRITER In Boyle Heights, just out of the shadow of Bunker Hill's whistle- clean high-rises, children fr~hc against a wall so covered wIth spray-paint scribble that Its angi- nal color is hard to discern. FLA- C02, the wall proclailll8. CESAR!. FMeCX3. Inside the B&G L'quor Mar-ket, manager Jin Sup paeng throws his hands up in disgust. "This town!" he exclailll8. Along the Harbor Freeway. newly erected sound walls provIde miles of sand-colored stone-a vast canvas for graffiti vandals. The top Caltrans official in Los Angeles was appalled dunng a recent drive on Interstate 110 and immediately ordered a cleanup. It didn't lasL Trees are no longer spared. On almost every major thoroughf!,,"e in the city-downtown, the West- side, the San Fernando Valley-:- curbside trees, particularly the fI ~ cus with its pale bark, bear graff't' ,scars. There is nothing cIty offICIals , can do about it: the chemIcals that remove spray paint also kIll trees. , Even Mayor Tom Bradley s house is not immune. A recent drive past the mayoral manswn ~n Hancock Park revealed thIS cryptiC message, scrawled In red letteM on a cinder-block walh "Don't Screw Us Tom Please HPL'S ERK 69." Long a serious problem m Los Angeles' poorer neighborhoods. graffiti have become a cltywtde eyesore, marring the urban com- plexion like a runaway bout of acne. The toll' on the populatIon IS high-in the millions of dollars spent to eradicate It, m decreased property values, in the. cnme ex- perts say it spawns and m t~e.more intal)gible psychic costa of hvmg m a city that looks as though It IS under sieRe. "c- A With Joc~~:ndthe moun tams at its back, Los Angeles is a place of striking natural beau- ty. But this mecca of sunshine and palm trees-a city that has staked its reputation in large part on ,ts looks-increasingly is showing signs of urban decay. The most VIsible are graffiti. "I think we've gone to hell in a basket," said SylVia Gross, the 78- year-old president of the San Fernando Valley Federation, a group that represents 19 Valley homeowner organizations. "The places that are closed up for busi- ness and the trash that is left all over the place and the streets that are tom up and the graffiti that is on every building and the lack of landscaping is pil1ful. . . . What has happened to our town?" Tourist officials, usually reluc- tant to criticize the city they are paid to booIt. admit that they are worried. The Los Angeles Conven- tion and Vilitors Bureau. for elllIII1- pie, is quietly pressing city officials to get rid of graffiti before it opens a $485-million addition to itl downtown Convention Center in 1993. "People still come to Los Angel- es for the same reasons they al- ways have-for the sun, the heaches, and the glamour," said Gary Sherwin. spokesman for the visitors' bureau. "We still deliver on our promise in those areas. But t here are some areas, like graffiti, that are very troubling to us," This year alone, various govern- , ment agencies in Los Angeles will spend more than $15 million on graffiti eradication. That is not counting the myriad volunteer clllanup efforts, or the millions spent by private businesses. The problem has become so widespread that it has spawned its own cottage industry, graffiti removal serVices. But it is a losing battle, made more complicated by the fractured nature of Los Angeles, where overlapping city and county juris- dictions have no coordinated plan of attack. As these private and pultlic efforts fail, residents are grqwing frustrated. At3rd Street and Rampart Boul- evard, a bustling, low-income neighborhood just west of down- town. Juan Estrada loads soda cans into the back of his big white panel truck. Oniy the truck is not 80 wHite anymore-it is, rather, a colorful rolling advertisement for gangs and taggers. One message after another is crossed out. The 40- year-old Estrada has no clue what thev mean. 1- r.:.".1. C,J, Estrada, who recycles cans for a vmg, bought the used truck for $3.000, saVlng his money little by lIttie. At mght, he parks it outside ljia-apartment, and that's when the ~ti vandals hit. He USed to try t'o~ remove it, but each time he ~ed the truck, the graffiti came bad<. Eventually, he gave up. "There's nothing you can really do," he Said, adding that he is not the only one. He points down the .1!l8ck, to another white truck. It is as III8rred as bi& Farther west, in the city's Mira- cle Milit district. the people who live It Whitworth Drive and Gene- " see Avenue- are worried. Graffiti are beginning to hit their qUiet : neighborhood of Spanish-style du- . plexes. They see it as a harbinger of the community's decline. "To me," Robert loUis Said, "it : means that a whole bunch of other problelll8 Will follow. It means gangs. . . . This is a nice, middle- , class, integrated neighborhood. Y QU don't want the neighborhood to start going downhill because of something like graffiti," : Next door, Deborah Rosenthal can barely contain her contempt . for the people who marked their . .liirf on her garage. "It fee!s," she :.... "like little dirty rats coming , out at nighttime," ..... As graffiti tighten their hold on the city, neighborhood activ- ists are striking back. Adolfo Nod- al, who waged a highly publicized anti-graffiti campaign in MacAr- thur Park during the mid.l98Qs and heads the city's Cultural Af- fairs Department, said Los Angelel isior the first time experiencing "a .grass-roots movement to cut down dQ visual blight." in the San Fernando Valley, for instance, 4.000 people participated in a November graffiti paint-out spearheaded by the Los Angeles Police Department. In one morn- ing, the volunteers used 1,700 gal- lons of paint. eradicated 62,000 feet of graffiti and picked up 127 tons of trash to boot. In Hollywood. Laura Dodson took a different tack. The Neigh- . ....hood Watch leader founded "Boulevart," a program in which 200 young people pledged not to deface Hollywood Boulevard in exchange for having their graffiti displayed as art. While construc- tion of a new theater complex was under way, Dodson obtained per- mission for the youths to put up dramatic spray-paint murals ,on the temporary wooden walls sur- rounding the site. Dodson also supervised a 40- by I,OOO-foot muraJ on the side of a Hollywood <Gsco. . ,. Dodson believes that making tllese graffiti murals legal is the. c\lre for "tagging" -the work of non-gang members who have cre- ated the graffiti explosion by scrawling their names on trucks, bJlses, walls and buildings all over tile city. (The most infamous of all taggers, Chaka, left his moniker in more than 10,000 places before his arrest in November, 1990. In July of last year, Chaka-a.k.a Daniel Bernardo Ramos- was sentenced to 90 days in a boot camp program and 900 houn of graffiti cleanup after admitting that he had violat- etl his probation.) : "The artists have a lot of control OIl'these taggers," she said, "and if they had more places to be creative they could encourage the taggers t9 come over to their side, to do art instead of the vandalism. These kids need respect like everybody else." Many disagree. Hannah Dyke, a Sylmar anti-graffiti activist who is a vocal opponent of graffiti art, says g\'3ffiti in any form lead to more graffiti and vandalism. "If the so-called artists want to do art- work," she said tersely, "for years and years canvas has been a sue. cessful medium." In fact. the graffiti-as-art debate is so intense that when Los Angel- es sponsored a "graffiti summit" in September, federal mediators were brought in to supervise the discus- sion. Wounds were still raw from the last gathering several years ago when, Dodson said. some anti- graffiti activists became so enraged .at the art proponents that they threw Cruit at the head table. Experts who study graffiti say they do not occur in a vacuum but are linked to other forms of blight-litter, run-down housing, a proliferation of billboards and even ugly buildings, such as mini - malls or storage warehouses. These fea- tures come to define the character of a neighborhood, they say. spin- . ning a cycle of graffiti and vandal- ism. Graffiti also can lead to more serious crime, according to UCLA criminologist James Q. Wilson, au-. thor of the so-called "broken win- dows" theory. Wilson reasons that signs of disorder in society-graffiti, bro- ken windows, abandoned cars, trash-frighten law-abiding peo- ple into avoiding public places. 'Those places are then left to crimi- nals' who further deface them, creating a downward spiral in which the fear of crime leads to an increase in crime. "I regard Los Angeles as kind of on the cusp," Wilson said. "It wouldn't be difficult for it to slip down because this process starts like an urban cancer." Robert Rome. an Encino psy- chologist who is a former vice president of Homeowners of Enci- no, said: "Graffiti tends to make people feel that they cannot trust anyone. that they have to be protective of their own property o and be on guard. It tends to take away the neighborhood feel, which used to exist throughout Los An- geles and is now a shrinking com- modity." Some cities have had limited success in cleaning up graffiti. New York has largely eradicated graffiti from its 5.000-car subway fleet, a feat that most residents once thought impossible. The Transit Authority began its program in 1984, cleaning its sub- way cars one by one and employ- ing its own police to deter vandals. If graffiti reappeared. the car would be withheld from service until it was clean again. As the program expanded, the authority helped develop new car-cleaning products. including graffiti remov- ers, stainless.steel cleaners and graffiti-resistant paint, that it says are safer and cheaper than what was previously available. But the $6-billion subway clean- up campaign, which drew na- tionwide praise, did not end New York's graffiti problem, said Penny Brackett, an official with the Tran- sit Authority. When spray-paint- ing subway cars was no longer an option, Brackett said, vandals be- gan carving up windows. So the transit authority installed scratch- resistant glass in the cars and the vandals. she said, "were driven from underground into other ar- eas," such as sanitation trucks and buildings. And some subway graffiti per- sist; Brackett said workers still spend an average of 110 houn a week cleaning spray-paint off sub- way cars. In Los Angeles, the new Metro Blue Line has remained graffiti- free since it began operating more than a year ago. Transportation authorities-conscious that they must project an image of safety to o attract riders'- have gone to extra- ordinary lengths to police the sys- tom and keep it clean. The Los Angeles County Trans- portation Commission is paying sheriff's deputies about $13 million a year to police the line-even while it operates at a deficit. As is the case with the New York sub- ways, if a Blue Line car is defaced, it is taken out of service and immediately cleaned. Providing that same level of attention to buildings is a Car more difficult task, especially in a city with an estimated I million struc- tures. A recent citywide survey. conducted by meter readers for the Department oC Water and Power. Cound that 2.300 single-family homes, 2,200 apartments and 2.400 commercial buildings had been marred. The agency, however, ac- knowledges that its count is low, the DWP employees who gathered the information examined only the sides of buildings that faced the meters they were checking. Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess the Cull extent to which graffiti have become wo- ven into the visual Cabric of Los Angeles, one thing is certain, as the, phenomenon exploded during the last few years, so has the cost to taxpayers. The Southern California Rapid Transit District expects to spend $12 million this year on graffiti removal-twice what it spent three years ago-and officials say that is not nearly enough to keep the fleet of 2,500 buses clean. Caltrans, meanwhile, has upped its Los Angeles graffiti removal budg- et tenfold since 1985. Jerry Baxter. Caltrans' regional director in Los Angeles, says that his jurisdiction accounts for 85% of the freeway graffiti in. the state. Caltrans is forgoing other mainte- Plein He GRAFFITI, A13 , , '. ,- ., o LACY ATKINS I Los Angeles Times The work of local graffiti artists is taking a high toll on the city. o .~GRAFFITI: Taking Toll on L.A.'s Psyche .CoDtlDued from A12 nllDce-such as tree trimming and fixing potholes-to devote more :"funds to graffiti cleanup. Recently. ,: after Baxter gave it agonizing thought. the agency resorted to ,'putting razor wire around over- .- head freeway signs. ,:: "The only measure of success that we have seen so far is with our - ':--razor wire," Baxter said, "and un- . fortunately we can't put razor wire on everything." , The City of Los Angeles budgets 53 million a year for graffiti re- moval. most of it to pay for crews that respond to the complaints by homeowners and businesses. Else- where-on light standards. utility .boxes. stop signs and trees-it simply remains. The signs of graffiti cleanup ,campaigns-public and private- Me evident across the city, in patchwork squares of unmatched paint on walls and buildings. But one expert says these piece- meal paint-outs may be backfiring, 'Ernest Garrett, the founder of braffiti Prevention Systems, a graffiti removal company, says his statistics show that when graffiti are covered in patches. they are three times as likely to reappear . than if the wall were all one color. Garrett says the paint squares serve as invitations to graffiti van- dals. "It's like a dog urinating on a hydrant," he said. "Somebody has already been there." Over the years. there have been various efforts to control graffiti by clamping down on the ubiquitous spray can. Under California law. retailers are prohibited from seU- ing spray paint to minors. But the law is not heavily enforced and some graffiti vandals simply steal their supplies, By the estimate of one manufac- turer, more than 8.000 spray cans are used daily to deface property nationwide. In Los Angeles, city officials lind bureaucrats say they have little hope of winning the war against graffiti. The only way the problem will be cured, they say, is for residents and businesses to shoul- der part of the burden. To that end. the private nonp'rof- it group Los Angeles Beautifui recently kicked off a "cleanup, fix-up, paint-up civic pride" cam- paign that encourages schools, res- idents and businesses to join what it is billed as the first citywide beautification effort. Since Octo- ber, community groups and schools have initiated more than 400 clean- up projects. according to Ronald Cox, the organization's chairman. "If we are in a neighborhood, where we have trees and flowers and the walls around our homes are clean. then the aura of beauty is heightened for aU of us. and there is less likelihood that graffiti will occur." Cox said. "The long- term solution is for everyone in the city to take on that civic pride," Others. however, suggest that graffiti have proliferated precisely because Los Angeles has lost its sense of civic pride. Kevin Starr, a USC historian who has written three books about Southern California, complains that today's Los Angeles residents feel little kinship with the city. They have come here, he says, to take what Los Angeles has to offer-a better job, a chance at fame, an escape from poverty. The result is that the city has turned inward, creating beautiful private interiors-shopping malls. restaurants, homes-while paying little attention to outdoor public places like parks and streets. Sim- ply stated. 'he says, people don't care enough about Los Angeles to clean it up, "They care about their homes, their television sets, their family lives," Starr said. "The goai. 'of private fulfillment is built into the core of this society. . . . But a city that turns its back on the public life. the public dimension of things. shouldn't be surprised if the public sector is defaced." , .. o The Cityls Graffiti Count Here is a look at the concentratton of graffiti in the city of Los Angeles. as measured by Department of Water and Power meter readers during the summer of 1991. (One visit per ZIP code was made during a twCHnOnth period.) Some toned areas represent more than one ZIP code. o ~,.,<. - ~.. ~. .... CJ No_ T_ . . CJ 1.. r:.:zJ 51.100 - 101. UO - 151. 200 - 201. 250 - 251. 300 - 301+ , , 0- o o 1.01 Anse1e8 Timet California Conservation Corps worker sandblasts gratIIti from wall in Wilmington. -- 'I think we've gone to hell In a basket. The places that are closed up. 0 . and the graffiti that Is. on every building and the lack of landscaping Is pitiful. 0 . . What has happened to our town?' SYLVIA GROSS San Fernando Valley Federallon , , .