Cleaning Up : Youth Volunteers Pick Up the Slack When Tight Budget Forces City to Scale Back in Graffiti War

Paint rollers at the ready, young volunteers are helping Glendale keep up the fight against taggers after the city cut back its anti-graffiti program last year.

“We’re doing this for our children,” Nathan Deeds, a sixth-grader at Delphi Academy in La Canada, said as he prepared to wipe out tag names on a warehouse wall. Nathan and 37 other Delphi pupils fanned out recently along the Southern Pacific railroad tracks at Tyburn Street. Their mission: to blot out a half-mile stretch of graffiti with beige paint. Theirs is one of six groups helping the financially strapped city clean up graffiti along Verdugo Road, Brand Boulevard, Broadway and the Southern Pacific tracks, a popular hangout for gangs. “I just don’t have the staff to keep up with the graffiti we’re getting,” said Sam Engel, Glendale’s Neighborhood Services administrator. “We just don’t have the resources.” On both sides of the railroad tracks, warehouse walls are the canvases of gang members and taggers. Taggers spray-paint their names in as many places as possible, while gangs use graffiti to mark turf boundaries. “Eventually, the tagger guys are going to realize that it’s going to get cleaned and they’ll give up,” said Delphi student Darryl Verret, 11. “We’ll just keep on doing it over and over again. We don’t get tired of this, but they’re gonna get annoyed.” Delphi Academy has helped Glendale fight graffiti for years, but the school joined the city’s new anti-graffiti campaign officially last month. Under the program, volunteer teams adopt a part of Glendale to clean once a month. Some of the volunteers from Allan F. Daily High School, a continuation school in Glendale, were former taggers. Others belong to an all-girls’ service group called Assisteens in Glendale, a junior version of the Assistance League. * In addition, city officials have enlisted an Asian student club at Glendale High School, Red Cross Youth and Arden House, a rehabilitation center for the mentally ill that is part of the Verdugo Health Center in Glendale. The city provides them with training and supplies, and asks them to report how much graffiti they remove. It takes little time for gangs or taggers to attack almost any surface with aerosol paint cans, wide-tip markers and shards of glass, city officials say. Targets range from benches on Brand Boulevard to industrial buildings in south Glendale. The city removed an average of 36,000 square feet of graffiti a month last year; with the new volunteers, that number is likely to increase. During the last three weeks, police arrested six juvenile taggers in west Glendale. The city’s anti-gang unit keeps records on such arrests and expands its collection of tag names with help from Neighborhood Services. The city has passed a number of ordinances to deter graffiti. In November, 1990, the City Council approved a law requiring stores to lock aerosol paint cans behind counters. Another statute restricts the sale of spray paint to minors. The state Supreme Court on Feb. 4 upheld the right of local governments to pass such laws, following a challenge by the Sherwin-Williams paint company. Neighborhood Services officials fear they might have to scale back their $190,000 anti-graffiti budget because of another projected shortfall this year. Glendale lost its graffiti program supervisor last year because of budget cuts, but retained one full-time and two part-time employees to clean the city’s moniker-marred walls. “It’s not the most effective use of city resources to remove graffiti,” Engel said. “So to get volunteers to do this not only helps us financially, it sends a real message that we’re concerned and care about our community.”