Vandalism can lead to felony charges, but that hasn't stopped many people in Santa Maria where graffiti has become a common eyesore for people in the city.
“We see it pretty often in our neighborhood. Not too long ago, we saw people doing graffiti and it just looked awful," said Santa Maria resident Jose Merino.
For staff at Santa Maria’s Recreation and Parks Department, cleaning up the graffiti is a daily task and has increased in the past several years.
I joined Senior Park Services Officer Ruben Ramirez on a ride-along to see some of the areas they’ve cleaned up.
Ramirez tells me that removing all graffiti is a priority, but gang-related graffiti is addressed urgently.
"We try to get it off as soon as we can. The unfortunate part is, if we do get it off within two hours, even a couple of days, the graffiti is back up and we're back out here doing the same thing over again," Ramirez said.
Clean-up efforts can be time-consuming.
"It is very tedious. Right now, we just have a standard pressure washer," Ramirez said.
But with recent city council approval, Ramirez’s department is excited about the purchase of a $180,000 graffiti removal truck.
“This new pressure washer or a graffiti truck that we're going to be purchasing, it's very powerful," Ramirez said. "It's state of the art, so it's supposed to be able to remove the graffiti that we're not able to do right now.”
Dennis Smitherman, Recreation Services Manager, says funding for the truck will come from the city’s general fund, Measure U and special districts.
Their department is also working on other measures to prevent more vandalism.
"We are exploring options to put surveillance inside the park systems and just having enough rangers out here and being a high deterrent and having high visibility is going to help us try to slow it down a little bit," Ramirez said.
