CINCINNATI — Cincinnati City Council is poised to revoke parts of a controversial rule passed in 2024 that pushes graffiti clean-up costs to property owners who are the victims of vandalism.
In March, WCPO 9 I-Team reported on a West End homeowner who faced an $18,000 clean-up bill after vandals repeatedly tagged his warehouse.
This week, council will consider an amnesty program proposed by council member Mark Jeffreys. It stops penalizing victims, encourages Cincinnati police to try new techniques such as surveillance cameras and drones, and recommends that offenders be forced to clean up graffiti as part of their criminal sentencing penalty.
“We have an ordinance in place where we essentially penalize a private owner if there’s graffiti. He’s the victim,” Jeffreys said. “We need to put a pause on that and say, ‘Hey, look, if people are being victimized, we shouldn’t victimize them again.’”
WATCH: How graffiti is impacting local property owners
Jeffreys met with Rory Benson on Monday outside the historic warehouse on York Street, where he has lived for more than a decade. Vandals occasionally tagged it with graffiti, but until recently, city crews always cleaned it up without being asked.
Around 2020, in the middle of COVID, it just stopped.
"I would call, I would get no response,” Benson said. “I thought there were delays just because of COVID … and it was a few years before someone finally said, ‘Hey, we just don’t do that anymore.’”
Benson said he was given no notice of the city's rule change. For many years, the Department of Public Services had removed graffiti from both public and private property.
That formally changed in May 2024, when the Cincinnati City Council voted to limit graffiti cleanup to public sites at the suggestion of City Manager Sheryl Long.
“Over time, shifting responsibilities within the city administration have rendered portions of the present graffiti abatement chapter functionally obsolete,” Long wrote in a May 8, 2024, letter to council introducing a new program “to provide an improved mechanism to mitigate graffiti within our neighborhoods.”
Instead, West End residents say the city’s new policy has encouraged vandals to produce an ever-increasing amount of graffiti in their neighborhood. Many homeowners can't afford removal, so it isn’t getting cleaned up.
“It’s basically surrounding the neighborhood, fast. It just keeps exploding and radiating out,” Benson said in a March interview.
The city’s Buildings and Inspections Department now oversees graffiti abatement, along with other nuisance issues, including overgrown grass, litter and dumping on private property. Once a notice of violation for graffiti is issued, owners have 30 days to remove it.
WCPO asked Jeffreys why he and other council members voted for the ordinance in 2024, only to attempt to largely repeal it two years later.
“It seemed like a sensible thing to do at the time,” Jeffreys said. “I think when you realize something has unintended consequences, then you course correct it, and I think that’s as it should be.”
Jeffrey’s motion will be considered by the Law and Public Safety Committee on Tuesday and if it passes, city council will vote on it Wednesday.
“The first thing is Buildings and Inspections will stop forcing owners like this to remove it, and they’ll work with them on solutions,” Jeffreys said. “The second is the administration will put together an ordinance on, ‘if you tag it, you scrub it,’ … we’ll come back in August and vote on that.”
“Then the third is CPD can pilot different enforcement and come back and say what’s effective and what’s not, and the administration can also come back and propose potentially some other ideas to address graffiti,” Jeffreys said, noting that some cities provide free pressure washers and paint to residents to clean up graffiti.
Over the next few months, Jeffreys wants the city to create a more comprehensive solution to the graffiti problem.
“The challenge, as we all know, is if you don’t remove it, it becomes a display of whoever has done the graffiti. They love that. They hate it when you remove it,” Jeffreys said. “I think the key is the quicker you remove the graffiti, the better it is, and then it discourages it.”
As of June 15, three months after Benson first spoke to WCPO, he said his graffiti is still there.
Benson received his first notice of violation last summer. He didn’t want the city to send out a random cleanup company for fear it would damage the façade of his warehouse, which was built in 1904 and had been owned by the Wegman family. He tried to remove it himself.
“One company gave me a quote for $18,000 to have it removed,” Benson said. “Another company said that they knew the city was changing their policies and that I should be warned that other people are going to be increasing their prices because of that … then I’m just forced to pay whatever the city assesses. They’ll just put a lien on your property.”
Benson asked city crews to remove all graffiti one last time, so he could apply an anti-graffiti coating on a clean surface and prevent future vandalism at his warehouse. But he said the city inspector refused.
Instead, Benson spent more than $1,000 on special chemicals that partially removed some of the graffiti last summer.
“It was a couple of weeks after I took most of it off that, at least my first pass, that another giant piece showed up,” Benson said.
On March 9, Benson said he received another violation notice, warning that the city could place a lien on his property if he fails to remove the graffiti.
“We regret that you were the victim of this vandalism. Nonetheless, as owner of the property, it is incumbent upon you to see that the condition is abated,” a building inspector wrote in the notice.
Benson's neighbor, Paul Tucker, got hit with his first noticeable graffiti last year. He bought his first building in the neighborhood in 2007 for his luxury commercial seating business, Orange Chair. He bought a second large industrial building across the street on Hulbert last year to expand.
“This just really kind of exploded in the last number of months,” Tucker said in a March interview. “I think it’s a fair question to wonder why the city stopped maintaining it, because had I known this was a problem and it was going to cost me, say $18,000 a shot, I might not have made this investment.”
When WCPO checked back with Tucker, he wrote in an email last week, “I am in the process of taking care of the issue on my own in any case as I approach moving into the new space. I would love to stay abreast of whatever the city plans on doing … Hoping that they can come together and reintroduce some sort of ongoing police & repair program moving forward.”
Jeffreys said he’s also heard complaints from “hugely frustrated business owners” in Northside over repeated graffiti tagging.
“This is one of many things that we need to tackle. Litter. Graffiti. Overgrown weeds. It communicates a sense that we don’t care,” Jeffreys said.
