The City of Bend is seeing an influx of graffiti reports, and some of its crews have had to divert their time to taking care of it.
“There’s definitely been an increase. We’ve had 39 citizen service requests so far this year related to graffiti. It’s more than normal,” Transportation and Mobility Department director David Abbas said.
Abbas said while the city is able to handle the current graffiti work load, it has taken crews away from prioritized maintenance projects.
“Most of the time it falls on our landscape crew. Typically, we’d much rather have them maintain our medians, landscaping and roundabouts vs. painting over graffiti,” Abbas said.
The city isn’t the only agency dealing with issue. Bend Park and Recreation crews have also been responding to reports of vandalism.
“We have had about 900 hours spent on clean-up activities and about $45,000. That was just last year alone. Multiple times a week we have crews where their priorities for the day have completely shifted because they need to respond to an incident of graffiti or vandalism,” Community Relations Manager for BPRD Julie Brown said.
How quickly the city addresses the graffiti depends on what it contains. If it includes inflammatory speech or generally offensive language, it will be dealt with as soon as possible. If the tags aren’t considered inflammatory and are mostly out of the public eye, the city will have a Deschutes County Juvenile crew take care of it.