Santa Rosa struggles to keep up with taggers

<p>The spray-paint cans lie in the creeks like dead fish, just one front in an ongoing fight against graffiti being pressed in the face of budget cuts.</p><p>The cans — presumably emptied, their contents left behind on the walls of culverts and bridges — are discarded by taggers whose work is done.</p><p>“They are a common trash item we find in the creeks because the graffiti people they don’t want to be caught with empty cans,” said Alistair Bleifuss, an environmental specialist in Santa Rosa’s utilities department. </p><p>While the cans are too small to contribute to stream obstructions that can lead to flooding, he said, they are a visual blight.</p><p>“Aesthetics would be the big issue,” he said.</p><p>The risk of contamination is an equally significant issue, said Mike Thompson, deputy chief engineer for the Sonoma County Water Agency.</p><p>“From an environmental standpoint they’re a huge issue,’ Thompson said. “The cans themselves contain a lot of toxic chemicals that you don’t want in your creeks — and they’re never entirely empty.”</p><p>Graffiti cleanup efforts are being pressed in the face of budget cuts that have hit hard.</p><p>“It really has impacted us because we’re down in staff,” said Paul Stiffler, park crew supervisor with Santa Rosa’s Recreation and Parks Department.</p><p>Last week crews were out again, collecting spray-paint cans from Santa Rosa Creek under Mission Boulevard in the shadow of walls covered by graffiti.</p><p>Paulin Creek, just south of Chanate Road, contained hundreds of spray-paint cans where a culvert is an attractive target for taggers.</p><p>Maintenance crews, charged with cleaning up graffiti in parks as well as other city-owned properties, were halved by budget cuts. The time spent to remove graffiti — which Stiffler said has spiked recently — takes away from the time his crews can spend on regular landscape maintenance.</p><p>“It seems every Monday after coming back from the weekend, several hours of graffiti removal has been typical,” he said.</p><p>Santa Rosa last year dropped its $175,000-a-year contract with a graffiti-removal service. Now, outside of the parks department, it relies on two full-time staff members to clean up city property that is tagged.</p><p>In the downtown core — from the Fourth Street corridor to Railroad Square — graffiti removal efforts have also been hindered by the demise of Santa Rosa Main Street. The business lobbying group, which had sponsored graffiti cleanup in the downtown, closed up after the budget-strapped city withdrew its financial support.</p><p>Whether that will lead to more graffiti — or graffiti staying visible longer — is uncertain.</p><p>“Right now it’s too early to tell,” said Bernie Schwartz, owner of California Luggage and a prominent downtown business voice. “But we’re going to keep a close eye out, and I think that business owners are going to have to step up” to clean tags on their buildings.</p><p>Santa Rosa street maintenance superintendent Clint McKay said that records kept by the department’s cleanup crew indicate that the number of graffiti “hits” remains about where it was in 2006, at an estimated 20,000 a year.</p><p>To the degree that graffiti is more noticeable now, he said, “It’s just that there’s no one there to take it off anymore, so it’s more noticeable, and it just looks like more.”</p>