PACIFIC BEACH – Those familiar with the Pacific Beach Town Council’s 16th Annual Graffiti Cleanup may not be aware that there is a huge project within that project: A community mapping survey pinpointing all the tags to be removed.
The leads for this year’s tagging survey are Jim Menders and Lindsay Weiner, who are still looking for graffiti surveyors ahead of the three-hour event coming up on May 2.
Volunteers are currently helping canvass the community and catalog all the graffiti. Once surveyed, individual tags (including actual photos) are turned in by April 25 to be accessed by clean-up crews on May 2 via a phone app.
Last year’s cleanup event drew 112 volunteers organized into 23 teams, who removed graffiti from 31 mapped areas of Pacific Beach. In total, more than 1,200 tags and stickers were eradicated.
But the volunteers still didn’t get all the tags. “Never in the history of the event has all the tags been cleaned up,” noted Weiner, who pointed out this year, so far, one surveyor has netted 500-plus tags alone in just one two-block area.
Surveyors spend nearly a month prior to the event documenting every tag to be cleaned up by crews working from 9 a.m. to noon on event day.
Menders, who’s been involved in the cleanup since it began, was honored by PBTC in January with the Ellen Citrano Caring and Compassion Award for his longtime service in the community beautification effort.
It was Weiner who introduced the PBTC to the software mapping technology and phone app, which Menders noted is far more advanced than the old surveying process PBTC used.
“In the beginning, everybody had a pencil and a Xerox reproduction of PB, and they would make little marks,” he said. “Then we would reproduce the marked maps and send them out to people. There was no picture connected to the mark. These days, there’s a picture of the graffiti that shows up when you tap the map on your phone.”
“This technology comes from a company called Esri,” Weiner said. “I created a survey for us, designed it based on what information we wanted to collect. The GPS these days is really accurate, which helps us.”
Lindsay Weiner and Jim Menders of PBTC are leading a team of volunteers documenting graffiti tags. (Photo by Dave Schwab/Times of San Diego)“It’s very explicit, very detailed,” said Menders of the new GIS technology.
Is tagging getting worse in PB? “It looks like a bad year,” noted Menders.
“It’s not good,” concurred Weiner, pulling up a map on her phone app showing 500-plus tags documented just in one small section of town.
“Mission Boulevard has the most (tags), it was the densest last year,” she said. “Last year, we cleaned up 1,400 tags. And we have the data now to be able to say, ‘Here’s where it’s really worst.’”
Menders and Weiner talked about what volunteers get out of participating in PBTC’s annual anti-graffiti cleanup.
“Looking back on these things, it’s always really rewarding,” he said. “It just makes everyone feel good.”
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