Portland officials will now have an easier time slapping fines on people who don’t clean up graffiti on their property.
An ordinance the Portland City Council unanimously approved this month lets city officials skip the lengthy process they used to follow to prod property owners to paint over unsightly tags. Under the new rule — another effort in the city’s uphill battle with graffiti — officials can go straight to the city’s Code Hearings Office to open a case and seek penalties for property owners who don’t comply with the city’s 10-day deadline.
Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who brought the measure forward on Feb. 14, called it a “common sense, effective step that we are able to do immediately.”
Matt Olguin, the city’s graffiti abatement program manager, told city commissioners that the goal is to encourage more people to clean up tags on their buildings without costing the city a lot more money.
“Property owners are less likely to ignore the Code Hearings Office,” he said.
The new rule is reserved for the city’s biggest offenders who leave large portions of graffiti up and ignore the graffiti program’s requests for them to clean it. Property owners have 10 days to remove tags on their buildings once they’ve received notice from the city’s program — a rule that’s been in effect since 1998, according to Jimmy Radosta, a spokesperson for Rubio.
The ordinance didn’t include specific fines but the hearings office bases civil penalties on a variety of factors, including a person’s record of past violations, the magnitude of the problem and the person’s ability to pay.
The city previously had to get a warrant from an administrative law judge and pay for a crew to clean up the graffiti on the city’s dime. They would then charge the property owner for the clean up plus additional fees, without any promise of getting that money back, according to Olguin. Now, they’ve added an option to eliminate that step and move to fines through the hearings office.
This change will free up money for the city to help local businesses, nonprofits and home owners clean up tags on their property, Olguin said.
Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability has removed more than 500,000 square feet of graffiti since the agency took control of the graffiti program in October 2022, officials said.
As graffiti has spread in Portland, police and prosecutors have not kept pace with taggers, but representatives of the Police Bureau have said that cleaning up existing graffiti is one of the best deterrents. Many property owners in Portland, though, find themselves caught in an endless cycle of cleaning their buildings only to see them tagged again overnight.
Police have focused on catching high-profile graffiti vandals, often taking on just two cases of prolific taggers at a time. Most recently, 27-year-old Jerry Mijangos was arrested and indicted for tagging across the city.
— Austin De Dios covers public safety and diversity, equity and inclusion. Reach him at 503-319-9744, adedios@oregonian.com or @AustinDeDios.
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