SAN FERNANDO : Angry Residents Air Anti-Graffiti Ideas
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Community members frustrated by graffiti vandals who mar walls and buildings pitched everything from a Taggers Anonymous group to jail sentences during a city-sponsored forum aimed at finding solutions to wiping out graffiti.
“I’d like to come down hard on them and see them spend two hours in the pokey and let the parents come and get them,” said Joe Rowan, a San Fernando resident, who volunteers his time to paint over unsightly scrawls on city surfaces.
Some people in the 40-member audience nodded in agreement Monday night when a merchant suggested that business owners and residents stop looking to the city to solve the problem and instead grab a paintbrush and clean up their own property.
San Fernando City Administrator Mary Strenn said officials will take the ideas and incorporate some of them into the city’s existing graffiti removal program, which costs $100,000 annually.
Strenn said she liked the suggestion that convicted vandals perform their community service by painting over graffiti.
The city can support “the assignment of the youths themselves with very close supervision,” she said.
City officials also applauded a two-month-old program by a group of about 70 San Fernando High School students who take turns painting campus walls and buildings every week.
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