VOICE Draws Council Support for an Anti-Graffiti Tax : Laws: About 2,000 members of a coalition support the plan. They say it would be the largest program of its kind in the nation.

An ordinance that would tax utility customers to raise millions of dollars annually to pay for scrubbing Los Angeles clean of graffiti will get its first airing next month before a City Council committee.

Supporters said the proposed program would be the largest and most comprehensive in the nation. “We are going to put Los Angeles on the map as the first city in the United States to be graffiti-free,” said Marsha Novak of Tarzana, co-chairwoman of Valley Organized in Community Efforts, the group backing the proposal.

Details of the program have yet to be worked out, but members of VOICE, a coalition of San Fernando Valley-based churches and synagogues, already are soliciting and winning the support of City Council members.

About 2,000 VOICE members voted to endorse the ordinance, introduced last month by Councilman Joel Wachs, at a “Call to Action” assembly Wednesday night at Valley Beth Shalom Temple in Encino. Council members Joy Picus and Zev Yaroslavsky, who attended the event, promised to support the ordinance.

Wachs proposed the ordinance after a VOICE delegation demanded at a May 10 council budget meeting that the city increase its spending on anti-graffiti programs from $2.8 million to at least $5.3 million.

VOICE leaders said Wednesday that ridding the city of graffiti is a key element of efforts to curb crime and regain control of crime-plagued neighborhoods.

“Graffiti is a public billboard for advertising gangs, drug deals, prostitution and sometimes even death,” Novak said.

She said VOICE research showed that no city in the country has an on-going, comprehensive program to remove graffiti. “Los Angeles would be the first,” she said.

The Wachs ordinance would add a surcharge to all customers’ water and power bills to pay for the anti-graffiti program. VOICE has proposed that residential customers pay 50 cents per month and that commercial customers pay $1 a month to raise $9.7 million for the program.

Greig Nelson, a Wachs aide, said those figures may change after details about city departments’ current anti-graffiti programs are compiled. The Department of Recreation and Parks, for example, removes graffiti from its buildings and grounds and street maintenance crews remove it from stop signs and street signs, but there is no comprehensive city program, Nelson said.

Details of the new program, such as whether city workers or criminal offenders working off their sentences would remove graffiti, also have yet to be determined, Nelson said. Charging utility customers appears to be the easiest way to collect the fees, he said.

If the program is approved, Nelson said, Los Angeles would be the first city of any consequence in the nation to undertake such a project, according to his research. “We’re blazing new territory,” Nelson said. “I think the biggest that has been undertaken has been New York City and its subway. No car goes out in the morning that isn’t clean of graffiti.”

The ordinance is to be heard July 10 by the city Budget and Finance Committee.

At Wednesday’s meeting, VOICE leaders also reported on the status of other anti-graffiti efforts during the past two years by the organization.

A bill to raise more money for graffiti cleanup is being carried in Sacramento by Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) at the request of VOICE and its sister organizations in Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.

That bill would allow local governments, with the approval of voters, to impose a surcharge of up to 10 cents a can on spray paint. The funds raised by the tax would go for graffiti removal.

Katz said the ordinance, which will be heard on the Assembly floor Monday, provides a tool to “paint off graffiti as fast as gang members put it up.”

VOICE leaders also said several judges have consented to sentence people convicted of minor offenses to graffiti removal duty instead of other forms of community service. They praised ordinances passed by the city of San Fernando and Los Angeles County that require merchants to lock up spray paint and urged Los Angeles to do the same.