The city of Tucson and Pima County work together to remove graffiti, but recent budget cuts have hampered their efforts.

Pima County slashed its graffiti removal budget from $250,000 to $125,000, and Pima County Supervisor Ann Day says this is a problem.

“Graffiti is a daily in-your-face attack,” said Day. “I’m very concerned that our county administrator has already cut the graffiti department budget in half.”

The battle to curtail graffiti is a daunting task, one that Graffiti Protective Coating’s David Caceres has been fighting for a few years.

“It was real bad when we first came here about three years ago,” said Caceres. “It was real bad, and for us to bring the city up to this level right now is pretty good.”

People report graffiti to the Taking Action Against Graffiti, or TAAG, which then coordinates the removal.

Julie Simon, the TAAG Coordinator, says that even with the budget cuts, the program is still functioning and removing graffiti.

“We’ve had to make some adjustments as far as how our program is run and what we’re able to do,” said Simon. “We are still working on public property, like washes and drainages and those kinds of things, but the private property we’ve had to scale back.”

The TAAG program was created in 2006 by Supervisor Day was the driving force behind the creation of the TAAG program and believes the removal process is still staying on top of the problem.

“We’re keeping up but I think we’re at a slower pace that we probably don’t get it removed in 24 hours but now it’s maybe 48 hours,” said Day. “We want to be clean and beautiful and we don’t want to look like a third world country.”

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