Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Palmdale Seeks Payment From Parents Over Graffiti

Launching a new program aimed at holding parents responsible for graffiti scrawled by their children, city officials announced Wednesday that they have sent letters to nine families with youngsters convicted in court, demanding $8,890 in reimbursement.

Palmdale joins a growing list of public agencies seeking to force the parents of taggers to pay for graffiti cleanup costs and for monetary rewards given citizens who help catch the youngsters. If parents do not pay, Palmdale officials said, they will be sued in small claims court.

“The whole reason for us doing this is so parents will take responsibility for their kids,” said Terry Stubbings, Palmdale’s community relations officer. “I have a great deal of hope these people will recognize they need to make restitution,” she added.

Palmdale City Atty. Bill Rudell said he is confident that the city’s plan is legal. But other attorneys questioned whether the city has legal standing to sue parents for graffiti damage done to private property, and whether the reward costs could be reimbursable in court.

City officials declined to identify the nine families sent the letters on Monday. But Stubbings said charges against all 10 teen-age boys at issue--two were from one family--already have been upheld in Juvenile Court. And all of the cases were ones in which the city issued $1,000 rewards, she said.

Stubbings said the amounts being sought from each family range from $325 to $1,600, depending on the city’s costs in each case. The parents have until Sept. 6 to pay or face city legal action. Most of the youngsters also had other prior legal problems, Stubbings said.

The new city program has been in the works for months. But it took time to start because city officials had to get permission from Juvenile Court, using a provision of state law, to obtain the normally confidential juvenile court files containing the families’ names and addresses.

Stubbings said the city will evaluate future juvenile graffiti cases one by one to determine whether to pursue parental reimbursement. But she said the city probably will focus on cases where it has paid its standard $1,000 reward and where vandalism has been extensive.

City workers removed graffiti from 3,825 locations in Palmdale totaling 667,000 square feet during all of 1992, Stubbings said. Through just June of this year, those numbers had already hit 2,813 locations totaling 595,366 square feet. The city spends more than $100,000 a year on the effort.

Under the state’s civil code, parents of minors who willfully vandalize property with graffiti can face up to $10,000 in civil damages. But critics say many families cannot afford such costs. And they suggest only owners of vandalized property, not cities, can bring such actions.