Community Activist Tries to Make His Mark on Area by Rubbing Out Graffiti

George Heytens hates graffiti with a passion. Since retiring as a school maintenance worker eight years ago--”I’ve been fighting graffiti all my life”--the 63-year-old Woodland Hills resident has waged a personal war in the western San Fernando Valley, scrubbing, painting and sandblasting the offending emblems of gangs and taggers.

“We want our community to be clean,” he said. “We want it to be respectable.”

Community groups and local officials credit him with launching a highly effective graffiti-removal program in Woodland Hills, West Hills and Tarzana and say that he helped create a new ordinance, expected to win City Council approval, that would compel bus bench companies to keep their benches clean of graffiti.

“That’s become his personal crusade,” said Sandy Kievman, an aide to Councilwoman Joy Picus, whose office has supplied his group with paint.

“His energy was infectious,” said Tarzana resident Beth Nelson, explaining why she joined Heytens’ nonprofit anti-graffiti group, called the Neighborhood Beautification Program. “That’s the only reason it’s been a success--because he’s been obsessed.”

Granted, Heytens is not the first person to take civic sanitation into his own hands. A few years ago a North Hollywood man bought a water truck so he could hose down his neighborhood’s streets. Anti-graffiti groups abound. Last Saturday, civic groups from the northeast Valley held a community cleanup day in Sun Valley.

But if battling graffiti is war, then Heytens is one of the campaign’s more colorful and relentless guerrilla fighters.

Associates say that Heytens is persistent, at times impatient and often long-winded, punctuating every few statements with an insistent “You got what I mean?” He says passersby watching him scrubbing bus benches call him crazy.

“There is only one George in this world,” Kievman said. “He’s a pain in the neck, and I tell him that to his face.”

Still, Kievman counts herself among his admirers. “He is doing a wonderful job. We’re real proud of him.”

Heytens launched the Neighborhood Beautification Program almost two years ago, pulling together the Tarzana Chamber of Commerce, Warner Center Marriott, Woodland Hills Homeowners Assn., Tarzana Property Owners Assn., West Hills Chamber of Commerce, West Hills Community Organization and Woodland Hills Chamber of Commerce.

Every weekend one of the groups supervises workers performing court-ordered community service as graffiti erasers. The organization used to request 20 workers each weekend but asks only for 15 because “it’s harder to find places for them to clean now,” Nelson said.

The organization survives on donations from about 200 members. With $1,200 in city funds, Picus recently helped buy the group a trailer to ferry a sandblaster Heytens had mounted on his truck.

Heytens said he is grateful the councilwoman knew how to squeeze money out of the city bureaucracy: “It’s a matter of shaking money loose, you got what I mean?”

Heytens stows cleaning supplies in his car trunk and if time permits he’ll pull over to the curb to wipe out graffiti that catch his watchful eyes. Like all natural leaders, he inspires through example.

Nelson said she now keeps cleaning supplies in her trunk too.