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'Graffiti Blasters' Slowed by Budget Woes in Wicker Park Updated: Monday, 19 Apr 2010, 9:49 PM CDT Published : Monday, 19 Apr 2010, 9:49 PM CDT Sun-Times Media Group Chicago - In Wicker Park, Mayor Daley's "Graffiti Blasters" -- those Streets and Sanitation crews armed with high-pressure, spray-paint-erasing devices -- can't blast fast enough to keep up these days. Take a ride on the Blue Line through the neighborhood or bicycle up Milwaukee Avenue, and you'll see that prolific taggers seem to be winning the city's $9 million-a-year war to keep storefronts and alleyways graffiti-free. "It's really bad in the alley," says Andrew Manto, a metal fabricator who works in the 1900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue. "I see the Graffiti Blasters -- I see them mostly driving around and not blasting." Since Daley created the Graffiti Blasters program in 1993, city workers have erased or painted over nearly 2 million graffiti tags, city Department of Streets & Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith says. At a total price tag of about $9 million a year, that means it's costing Chicago taxpayers about $76 a blast. "Graffiti is constant and cyclical," Smith says, "and we are constantly out there removing it." Indeed, records show the mayor's Graffiti Blasters have knocked out more than 172,000 graffiti tags citywide a year, on average, in 2008 and 2009. But with City Hall groaning under the weight of a record budget deficit, graffiti removal has declined every month since last October -- which also happens to be when the city lost its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since then, there have been nearly 10,000 fewer graffiti removals citywide compared with the same six-month period in 2008 and 2009, city records show. Don't read anything into that, says Smith. He says it's difficult to say why there is more or less graffiti removal done at any particular time -- but staffing and budget issues have not affected the work. "The fact is that we did more total removals in 2009 than we did in 2008," Smith says. "And we've done more removals so far in 2010 than we did in 2008. "Some years and months, there are more, and some less," Smith says. "It fluctuates. Graffiti is also impacted by the weather. I'm not sure it can be analyzed beyond all of these issues." Still, in Wicker Park, graffiti is an ongoing problem that gives an "embarrassing first impression" to people visiting the neighborhood, says Paula Barrington, executive director of the Wicker Park and Bucktown Chamber of Commerce. Barrington says the Graffiti Blasters generally are responsive to her calls -- earlier this month, they removed tags from the chamber's own building a day after she called 311. But some business owners say they've watched city workers remove some graffiti and then ignore other tags nearby. "They recently came to blast the sidewalk but didn't take any off the light poles or the walls," says Christa South, owner of Dance Spa on Milwaukee, who has fought taggers by installing security cameras. "We've had to clean up a lot. Once we put up cameras, people stopped writing on our windows." Allstate insurance broker Pete Fernandez says taggers are relentless near Milwaukee and Western. And he's tired of cleaning up their mess. "They just come back and hit it worse," says Fernandez. "It's a game to them." Barrington says she's not ready to surrender to the taggers in the graffiti war along Milwaukee Avenue. "The goal is to get it off walls and get it out of sight," she says. "We don't want it to serve as inspiration or an invitation for other taggers to do the same thing."

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