Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 9, September 2003

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Graffiti busters: Lake City merchants take aim at taggers

By JAMES BUSH

The spray paint stops here.

The Lake City neighborhood business district has been declared a "zero tolerance" zone for graffiti, says Megan Tormey of the Lake City Taskforce. The taskforce, the protective services committee of the Lake City Chamber of Commerce, is contracting with Goodbye Graffiti for weekly monitoring and clean up efforts in a ten block-square area centered on the intersection of Northeast 125th Street and Lake City Way Northeast.

Tormey says the rule of thumb for graffiti eradication is to remove graffiti whenever possible within 24 hours of discovery. "If they do that, generally speaking, the cycle will end," she says. But, tolerate graffiti, and it will quickly multiply.

Laurie Rasmussen, president of Goodbye Graffiti, says this effort represents her company's first contract with a Seattle neighborhood business group. Goodbye Graffiti was founded six years ago by a Vancouver, B.C., condo dweller after his unsuccessful search to find a firm to remove graffiti from his building. The company has since created several cleaning solutions to remove graffiti from a variety of surfaces, invented a buffing system to remove tags scratched onto windows, and initiated a program of regular graffiti monitoring and removal for businesses.

Lake City has had graffiti paint-out programs in the past, says Tormey, but they were dependent on volunteer labor and donated (and often mismatched) paint. "Painting over graffiti with a gray swatch on a red building doesn't accomplish very much," she says. "It doesn't protect the integrity of the building and it creates a new canvas for the graffiti artist."

While graffiti is often associated with gang activity, the typical tagger is a teenage male of low social stature seeking to "gain recognition and respect," says Rasmussen. Graffiti is generally created at night and, more often than not, with stolen supplies, such as shoplifted spray paint or ink markers.

The Lake City graffiti removal program started after the taskforce began working with the Headwaters Program, a North Seattle Community College community building effort. Students from NSCC began a tracking program to monitor and report graffiti along the Lake City Way corridor. Although the students reported the graffiti both to the city and to property owners, "what we were finding was that the majority of it wasn't being removed," says Tormey.

The taskforce, formed in 1994 to fund the hiring of off-duty police officers to patrol the Lake City commercial core on nights and weekends, then decided to take on the graffiti problem. The group recently received a $5,000 city grant to help pay for graffiti removal.

"That gets the ball rolling," says Tormey, "but now what we really need to do is increase our membership and our donations to make the program self-sustaining." The taskforce is funded through voluntary donations (generally monthly pledges of $25 or more per business).

Tormey says that vigilance is necessary to control graffiti for several reasons. Often, a tagger will spray-paint a black outline on a wall, then return a day or two later to fill it in with colored paint. If the outline is removed immediately, the tagger generally goes somewhere else. "When someone realizes there's no point, it will stop," says Tormey. "The more we remove graffiti the less there will be and the longer it stays the more there will be."

To reach the Lake City Taskforce, call the hotline at 362-8836. To report graffiti on public property, or graffiti which has not been removed from private property, call 684-7587 or file an online report at www.cityofseattle.net/util/ept/graffiti/report.htm