Supervisor proposes to halt fines for graffiti
The first vandal hit vegan pub Above Ground last June. Once one person with a can of spray paint tagged the Mission Street restaurant, the graffiti grew.
“I can’t even count,” said Michael McNamara, manager of the San Francisco restaurant. “The paint dries and you deal with another one.”
McNamara usually lets the tags pile up before covering them once a month, but he started getting warnings from the city Department of Public Works to clean the graffiti by a deadline or face a fine. Struggling to keep up with the constant repainting, McNamara said the restaurant has been fined twice for around $300 plus a $320 inspection fee, nearly the equivalent of a worker’s
weekly wages. The fees stung as the restaurant has let go of staff and halved operating days during the pandemic, and the business is far from alone.
“We’re barely making ends meet,” said Elizabeth Vazquez, owner of Tio Chilo’s Grill on 24th Street, which has repainted its vandalized building and parklet seven times. “It’s a cycle that never ends.”
As graffiti has worsened during the pandemic, the Department of Public Works has struggled with the problem. The city requires a private property owner to clean it in a month or face a fine unless there is an appeal. If the graffiti is large enough to be considered blight, the owner has to pay the inspection fee and fix it within 15 days or face a contractor fee of at least $500. Businesses are pushing back, but the city, which spends $20 million a year on cleanup, can’t afford to clean all graffiti on private property, Department of Public Works spokesperson Rachel Gordon said.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen said the system doesn’t make sense during a recession, and she is “fed up” with it. On Tuesday, she planned to propose an ordinance that would suspend notices of violation and waive unpaid fees until 90 days after the COVID19 emergency ends.
“If any business survives this, it’ll be a miracle,” Ronen said. “This one is a slap in the face.”
Gordon said the city works with building owners to tackle the problem. Public works paused violation notices during the first six months of the pandemic, save for a week over the summer, but complaints piled up. Enforcement resumed in September, with an option to appeal to get the deadline lifted because of COVID19 hardship.
Over the next six months, public works issued nearly 1,500 notices of violation and more than 2,400 blight notices. That compared to nearly 4,600 notices of violation and around 2,900 blight notices during the full prior year.
“Should Ronen’s legislation pass, we would expect to see a rise is graffiti complaints and/or graffiti remaining on private property longer, as we saw when we paused enforcement last year,” Gordon said. “To reiterate, we want to work with property owners.”
In addition to hardship waivers, in October the department started limited free graffitiremoval operations, sending out a small team early in the morning to cover up vandalism on private buildings, including at least 20 times in the Mission.
Ronen’s proposal, which doesn’t address the harsher blight ordinance, stresses that the Department of Public Works would still clean public property, and as warranted, private property. But Gordon said that although the agency does sometimes remove graffiti in private spaces — scrubbing off hate speech or offering free sixmonth removal if the problem is prolific — it doesn’t have the responsibility or capacity to remove all of it.
“Public Works is already stretched thin,” said Supervisor Aaron Peskin. “The city of San Francisco doesn’t clean up private property, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t relax our notices of violation.”
He supported temporary flexibility during the pandemic but said ultimately property owners are responsible.
Vandalism is hardly a new issue, with the city passing the buck to private property owners to clean their own buildings around 2004. After street and sidewalk cleaning, graffiti is the second most common complaint category to 311, with the most reports on commercial buildings.
The public works department convenes a graffiti advisory board, which brings together residents, police and the district attorney’s office. The latter two agencies designate resources to arrest and prosecute offenders.
“Ultimately, we’d like to get to a point where people don’t tag and try to keep our neighborhoods looking good and beautiful and welcoming,” Gordon said.