Vandals wreck Depot Park gazebo

If you think Sonoma’s public spaces are experiencing more than their share of defacement and damage, it’s not your imagination.
“This July I’m going on 35 years with the city, and I have never seen graffiti and vandalism as bad as I have in the last two years,” city Parks Foreman Dave Chavoya said Wednesday. “It’s just really mean-spirited.”
Chavoya was commenting in part on Tuesday night’s attack on Depot Park’s gazebo, a modest wooden structure near First Street East that houses shade-seeking park patrons and the occasional wedding. Vandals kicked out two of the gazebo’s lower panels and left spray-painted scrawls on the interior. Similar marks were deposited on the outside walls of the park’s bathrooms.
In 2004, the city’s total cleanup bill for graffiti and related vandalism was $4,000 – contrasted with $8,000 for the first four months of 2008. City staff are currently mulling creative funding options to help up the abatement ante – and will soon get some hands-on help from a local service organization.
“Not all youth is doing the graffiti,” said Shelly Lopez, who coordinates the Keystone Club leadership group with the Boys & Girls Club of Sonoma Valley. “There’s actually some youth who want to be involved on the other side of it, in removing it.”
Lopez’s group is devoted to community service, and the teens have decided to put their required 30-hours-a-month toward an all-out effort this summer in connection with the Sonoma Police Department.
Keeping the gazebo in repair is a never-ending task – “We’re constantly painting that thing as far as graffiti goes,” Chavoya said – and it had to be rebuilt almost entirely a few years ago after someone burned it down. Fresh paint was being applied Wednesday morning, but Chavoya said the latest fix was just one more item on a lengthening list for his four full- and two part-time workers, who are preparing for this weekend’s combined Ox Roast, Hit the Road Jack and Art & Artisan events – in addition to maintaining 11 of the city’s 13 parks as well as an abundance of landscaping, especially along Broadway.
“This last weekend [May 24-25] we got tagged so hard – the skate park was just annihilated, the bike path from Big O Tires coming east was just decimated,” he said. “I could cry … I just wish we could all pull together.”