Olympia puts indefinite hold on graffiti enforcement

The city of Olympia has paused sending out notices to business and property owners reminding them to remove graffiti from their premises.

City officials said they chose to step back from enforcing the graffiti-related city code earlier this month after painted slogans and designs attributed to demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality began showing up on walls and fences across town.

Leonard Bauer, director of Community Planning and Development, said that because the protests are ongoing and there is a heightened awareness surrounding the issues being raised by protesters, it makes sense for the city to take a step back on enforcement while still providing assistance to people who want help cleaning paint off their property.

“It’s not a specific moratorium, per se, but just us waiting until we decide to do any enforcement,” Bauer said. “There’s no definite date. They’re still responsible for that graffiti. We recognize there might be property owners who appreciate the message on their space, and they want to keep it, so it falls into a sort of free speech thing where if they want to keep it, we’ll work with them on that.

“It’s kind of a judgment call as far as if a specific instance of graffiti is related to the protests. It’s pretty hard to tell the difference, so we’re trying to allow for those messages to continue for a bit before we start trying to enforce.”

Bauer estimated that City Manager Jay Burney told Community Planning and Development to stop sending out notices on or about June 9. Under normal circumstances, property owners would first receive a courtesy letter from the city reminding them of their obligation under city code to repair outward-facing defacement of their premises. A formal notice to abate unlawful conditions would follow if the issue remained unresolved.

Continued refusal to clean up graffiti can result in a civil penalty or fine levied against the property owner, but that rarely happens, according to Bauer.

Burney cited the unpredictable nature of recent demonstrations as another reason why the city has chosen to hang back and wait on the enforcement front.

“I think right now that it’s not a logical expectation to put on people right now, because a lot of it literally happens overnight,” Burney said. “Right now, with the environment we’re in and everything, we want to strike the right balance here, and it doesn’t make sense to be out enforcing graffiti removal.

“If people are asking for help, we’re out there working with them. We do want to respect private property owners and what they do or do not want on their buildings.”

More than 1,200 incidents of graffiti tagging were reported in downtown Olympia from June 1 through June 25, according to data compiled by the city of Olympia. More than 1,050 of those took place on private property.

The city of Olympia’s Clean Team responded to 321 incidents during that time, though not all of the calls were graffiti-related. A heat map provided by the city shows the block of Washington Street between Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue to be the biggest hotspot for graffiti downtown.

Many of the graffiti tag removals carried out in June took place along those two arterial avenues between Columbia Street and Chestnut Street.

Other hotspots include Capitol Way between Fourth Avenue and Legion Way, as well as along Fourth Avenue between Jefferson Street and Adams Street.

Burney told The Olympian that it is possible that even once enforcement resumes, those who wish to keep protest-related graffiti on their walls a while longer might be granted the ability to do so.

“If I take demonstrations out of the picture, we have a normal program that when tagging normally happens, there’s an expectation that [the property owner] clean that up,” Burney said.

“Some of it is, I think, stuff people want to leave up over time, because we don’t want to lose sight of it. So, I think we’ll work with property owners who have those sorts of things on their buildings and want to keep them, while also striking the balance to make sure we have good compliance with our city codes.”