Long Beach May Try to ‘Melt Off’ the City’s Graffiti

Long Beach city officials struggling to stay a step ahead of the ubiquitous graffiti “artist” have streamlined their 5-year-old graffiti removal program and are taking a close look at one businessman’s claim of a permanent solution.

Long Beach spends more money--nearly $500,000 last year--on its anti-graffiti project than any of the other 25 Southern California cities operating such programs, said Phyllis Moore, the city’s neighborhood improvement officer.

Moore said the city is one of six in the region to provide a 24-hour graffiti reporting hot line for residents who spot new paint deposits and provides free removal through a private contractor to property owners, either with their consent after they have been reported or at their own request.

Earlier this year, separate programs aimed at public and private property were combined under one agency--the Public Service Bureau--to ease reporting confusion, Moore said.

The program has encountered ready acceptance from private property owners, who are serviced by a contractor who even matches colors to repaint after sandblasting walls. But city employees who are responsible for painting over graffiti on public buildings have trouble keeping up with the vandals.

“(The graffiti artist) has all the time in the world,” said Rosie Bouquin, capital projects coordinator of the city Parks and Recreation Department.

“But (graffiti) is a progressive problem and it’s getting worse all the time. We try to be pro-active, but we’ve been following behind. They hit so fast.”

As graffiti vandalism has spread from low-income neighborhood parks into more upscale areas, park workers have a hard time keeping all 43 buildings in the city’s 95 parks and “beautiful areas” clean, she said.

“We’ve tried a number of things, especially on restroom walls, which seem to get hit the worst,” Bouquin said.

Park officials targeted restrooms for a limited project to experiment with anti-graffiti paint and a nontoxic cleaner. Both were unsatisfactory, allowing “ghosts” of the graffiti image to seep back into view within months.

“We’re now looking at going back to chromatic tile in restrooms, which we used to use but stopped because of the expense,” Bouquin said. “But it’s harder to (paint) graffiti and just easier to replace instead of redoing the paint treatments or cleaners.”

Bouquin said park officials also are looking at a relatively new anti-graffiti method offered by Graffiti Prevention Systems of Los Angeles, a Sepulveda-based firm headed by Connecticut businessman Bob Schwartz.

Swedish Procedure

The firm uses a procedure perfected in Sweden, spraying walls with a preventive coating made of silicon and wax. Treatment of the affected surface with pressurized water removes both the coating and the graffiti. The coating is then reapplied.

Schwartz, who operates a similar service on the East Coast, said the business of graffiti removal is more difficult in California, where laws governing use of toxic chemicals are more stringent and enforcement more strict.

“The most effective graffiti remover I’ve ever seen, one that can be put on a brick surface where graffiti has been for two years, contains phenol, a poison,” Schwartz said.

“It’s not allowed in some areas. In other areas they don’t check. In California they always check, so you dare not use anything that’s illegal,” he said.

“The second and most difficult problem in California is that 80% of buildings are painted. Once graffiti is on a painted surface, no chemical in the world knows the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ paint.”

“So we had to develop a coating that could work out here in a different climate and on different wall services than in the East,” he said. “Our coating is ‘sacrificial,’ meaning it is literally melted off with hot water, taking anything with it that’s on top--like graffiti.”

$25 to $700 a Month

Schwartz said that in a year of operation, the company has signed contracts to service several Bank of America branches, about a dozen Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets and the Granada Hills shopping center. Costs range from about $25 a month for a bank building to $700 a month for the shopping center complex.

“Our California clientele has been much quicker to buy our program,” he said. “People in the East seem much more tolerant to graffiti--I guess it’s been around longer. But Californians like clean, even though there isn’t a tenth of the graffiti here that there is in New York.”

Bouquin said park officials are interested in Schwartz’s method, but are currently awaiting an opinion from the city attorney’s office to find out whether the city charter will allow a private company to provide services usually done by city workers.

“We think the service maybe would speed up our response time,” she said. “