PORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) – Traveling along Portland’s busy highways, you might notice some fresh coats of paint.
“Just about everything, like 98% of everything ODOT owns is painted,” said Robert Barrie, who owns Portland Graffiti Removal and is contracted with the Oregon Department of Transportation to clean up the highways around the city.
His team is out every single day, covering up graffiti, as long as the weather cooperates.
“Because we’re in the northwest, we get that rainy weather. It’s rainy because you can’t paint. So, we have to find areas that are covered,” said Barrie.
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But for a full year, it was politics, not the weather, holding up his work. State funding for graffiti cleanup on highways dried up in April of last year after legislators failed to act.
In early March, the Oregon legislature voted to allocate $20 million to ODOT, with $4 million specifically for graffiti. Barrie and his workers were ready to get to work on April 1, but were again delayed, waiting for Governor Kotek’s signature on the bill.
“So, once the governor signed it, I think she signed it on April 17, and we got to work on the 18th. We’ve been going ever since,” said Barrie.
In their first month back on the job, they went through over 20,000 gallons of paint.
“Most of that was, again, trying to cover up everything that has been there for that year from when they ran out of money in 2023 to when we started again in 2024,” said Barrie.
And while the paint does an excellent job of covering up the graffiti, it also creates a fresh canvas for taggers. Often time new tags show up with hours or days after the team finishes cleaning.
“So, now we just kind of have all the freeways, the six major freeways on a kind of a rotation basis. And so, they’ll build up for a few days and then we’ll come out, take care of everything over those two days while some other freeways get built up,” said Barrie.
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But that’s all just the low hanging fruit; the stuff his team can do from their vans on the side of the road.
In many places, the only way to safely work on the side of the highway is to shut it down.
“The plan as of right now, is to completely shut down I-84 for both directions from I-5 all the way to 205,” said Barrie.
It’s scheduled for 12 hours, from midnight to noon on July 13, a Saturday.
And it’s not just for graffiti removal. ODOT, the City of Portland, TriMet and Union Pacific are all coordinating to take advantage of the shut down time.
It’s set to be a successful major coordination, but also a sign of just how much work is left to do.
“It’s sad that it’s come to this. That there’s so many of us companies out here trying to keep the city that we all grew up in clean and, and we can tell our families from other states, come to Portland! It’s beautiful up here,” said Barrie. “We’re out there every day clean and trying to make it beautiful again.”
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