***Originally posted on 11/3, I've bumped it up due to a couple of Updates added at the end, this morning***
Graffiti is a problem just about everywhere, but Santa Ana has it bad.
Now comes this news from the OC Register:
The City Council will decide Monday whether to nearly triple the contract for Graffiti Trackers, the company it hired to analyze and catalogue photographs of graffiti. The revised contract would be worth $233,000 and would last into 2009.
Over at Orange Juice they don't think much of this:
Apparently city officials thought, when they hired this outfit, that they would be "uploading no more than 800 photographs a week to the company's tracking system." Oops. Turns out that the "average number of graffiti photographs taken each week has ranged from 2,000 to 3,500 since the program began." Here's a thought...hire ex-taggers to do this work. They will cost less and will know where to find the graffiti. And the city can employ its troubled youth. Nothing like a city job to set a young man straight.
OJ's suggestion is too intelligent by half so has a snowballs chance in hell of being ennacted. ;-D
See:
A Tip of the Hat to Orange Juice!
***UPDATE 1 - 11/21/07***
In a follow-up post on Orange Juice, for Nov. 5, Thomas Anthony Gordon comments:
How can the city claim that "The program has greatly helped the city's graffiti-removal efforts" when there is more than 4 times the amount of graffiti than the cities original estimates and the cost for the program has sky rocketed?
There's been nothing in the paper, or on OJ, about the Council Meeting, unless I missed it, and the city website has yet to add a link to the Minutes of the meeting to the archive.
***UPDATE 2 - 11/21/07***
I knew that sooner or later, some local nimrod, either a tagger, or someone who supports them, would come out of the woodwork to opine on this subject. ;-D
Sure enough someone left a Comment yesterday, and rather than leave it there I've promoted it:
Yes we will win!!!!
No matter what the city does we will all be back!!!!
All this is nonstop.
Once you get one off the streets two and even three more will come up.
SO STAY UP ALL YOU GRAFFITI WRITERS!!!!
PEACE TO DCK AND ALL THE HOMIES!!!!
Angela Zamora
Oh my, I'm trembling in my boots...NOT!
Angela, if that is even your real name, which wouldn't surprise me, you only display your ignorance and stupidity with your words and your support of criminal activity that does damage to the community and city you live in and shames and embarrasses all law abiding Hispanics in Santa Ana.
***END UPDATES***
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