Eliminate Graffiti Program
Graffiti Busters
The Graffiti Busters Program is designed to help community members remove graffiti as quickly as possible. The core of this program will be to develop four to six graffiti removal kits that community members can check out from LNA when graffiti happens at their home or business.
In addition to providing the graffiti clean-up kits to community members, at no charge, LNA will also recruit volunteers to help identify and clean-up graffiti throughout the neighborhood. The volunteers will be specifically tasked with helping community members who are unable to clean up graffiti on their properties – due to age, physical condition, etc. LNA will also work with the volunteers to identify, report, and clean-up graffiti on public utilities in a timely and efficient manner.
An additional component to the Graffiti Busters Program for the summer of 2009 will be to hire two Lyndale community members, preferably teens, to actively identify and remove graffiti throughout the neighborhood. These two, graffiti busters, will work 10 hours a week for 12 weeks canvassing the neighborhood looking for and removing graffiti in the neighborhood.
Graffiti Buster Staff Job Posting
Light-Up Lyndale
The second component of the Lyndale Eliminate Graffiti Program will to provide matching grants to property owners and businesses to improve lighting in the neighborhood. This program will encourage property owners to light up areas of the neighborhood that are hidden in darkness and frequent targets of graffiti.
The program will specifically encourage the installation of more motion-detector lighting, which can be more effective in discouraging criminal behavior than constant on lighting. Motion detector lighting does this by changing the environment around people who are thinking about tagging and alerting community members that there is movement in the area.
This program will provide matches for:
- 40 percent match for new exterior lights.
- 50 percent match for converting existing constant-on lights to motion detector, solar, or LED lights.
- 60 percent match for new exterior lights that are motion-detector, solar, or LED based.
The matching funds can be used for lighting fixtures, lighting implements, and licensed electricians to install new fixtures. The limit on matching funds will be $150 for residential buildings and $300 for commercial businesses.
Cover-Up Program
Lyndale’s Cover-Up Program seeks to build on the success and capacity built during last summer’s Walldogs on Nicollet project. This year’s goal will be to work with local artists, community members, property owners, and business owners to shrink the amount of prime real estate available to taggers by increasing the amount of public art and greenscaping in the neighborhood.
LNA will start soliciting proposals in the next few weeks for the creation of murals and greenscaping in the neighborhood. This will include commercial properties, residential properties – especially garages which are among the most frequently tagged structures in the neighborhood, public utilities, and garbage cans.
Proposals will be reviewed based on the following criteria:
- Reduction of prime graffiti locations (e.g. locations visibility, frequency of tagging)
- Aesthetic value of the proposed design
- Capacity of property owner to work with LNA to accomplish the project by this fall
- Ability of the project to engage community members in helping to reduce graffiti in the neighborhood
This program will provide matching funds for:
- Up to 75 percent match for residential properties up to $500
- Up to 75 percent match for commercial properties up to $1,500
To find out more about how you can access these programs or to sign up to be a graffiti buster check out www.lyndale.org or contact Norma at 612.824.9402 ext 15.
