The gazebo and bathrooms at Depot Park were
heavily vandalized the evening of May 27.
CAROLINE HALL/Sonoma Valley Sun
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,” Parks Foreman Dave Chavoya said last Wednesday. “It’s just really mean-spirited.”
Chavoya was commenting in part on the previous evening’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. On May 27, 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.
According to Chavoya, keeping the gazebo in repair is a never-ending task – “We’re constantly painting that thing as far as graffiti goes,” he 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-time and two part-time workers, who are preparing for last 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.”
Chavoya’s wish may soon become reality, thanks in part to new cleanup funding – and help from two local service organizations.
“Not all youth is doing the graffiti,” said Shelly Lopez, who coordinates the Keystone Club leadership group with the Boys & Girls Clubs 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 for young leaders-in-training, 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.
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. An item on last night’s city council agenda called for the Sonoma Community Development Agency to boost abatement efforts with redevelopment funding. No dollar amount was attached to the proposed resolution, but approval would establish a city graffiti abatement program that could in turn pay for “materials, supplies, public informational materials as well as City staff time (salary/benefits) for removal of graffiti.”
Also, tonight the Springs Redevelopment Advisory Committee will debate a possible $3,000 boost to the Valley of the Moon Teen Center’s own graffiti removal effort, which it operates as part of a gang intervention program in conjunction with the Boys & Girls Clubs and Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff’s Community Service Officer David Huber said the money will be well-received.
“Three grand will go a long way,” Huber said Tuesday. “I only get $1,500 a year in my budget – I’ll use it up in a year on paint and other supplies.”
Huber’s beat is strictly outside the Sonoma city limits, working with young people whose community service is voluntary or court-imposed, but he does assist locally as needed – for example, supervising an inmate crew from the county work farm to clean the city’s bike paths and adjacent residential fencing. In the case of the Teen Center, Huber’s job will mostly consist of training the new cleaners how to safely use their tools. He said the graffiti plague is cyclical – summers being worse than winters – with gang-related graffiti the most prevalent.
“From what I’ve seen, 70 percent is gang stuff – Nortenos and Surenos leaving their mark,” he said. However, he added that some former offenders have become public cleanup crusaders after completing their community service.
“Their perspective changes when they have to clean it up,” he said. “Some of them get it, some of them don’t.”
