The City of Emeryville and PG&E Celebrates 'Junior' and Hundreds of His Friends
Commentary
By Brian Donahue
A couple of months ago a few graffiti tags appeared on the wall of the PG&E building on Holden Street. Citizen complaints were received by the City who is required by statute to let the owner of the building know about it and to remind the owner they are required by law to remove the tags. Despite numerous complaints over many weeks, PG&E refuses to remove the tags and because graffiti is self propagating, one tagger’s efforts are repeated by another and another, now the whole building is covered and it is spreading to neighboring buildings.
This could be a primer in how not to conduct public policy.
For years Emeryville did a pretty good job combatting graffiti (the CVS building notwithstanding) but now the process seems to be broken. We don’t know the precise reason for the dysfunction but the City of Emeryville doesn’t seem capable of handling a problem like graffiti removal anymore. Tellingly, the police report to us that the City has informed PG&E about the problem but they have so far rebuffed any directives from the City to fix the problem. In frustration, we offered to do it ourselves. We said we will voluntarily paint over the tags free of charge but later, the police told us they spoke with PG&E and they said they will sue anybody that tries to paint over the graffiti tags on their building. The police, for their part, say they will arrest anyone who tries to paint over the PG&E graffiti tags if they catch them in the act.
PG&E will not obey Emeryville’s graffiti law and they will not let us do what they refuse to do. That lets us know all we need to know about the lack of community mindedness of this giant corporation in our town.
But then something changed. The police informed PG&E that the Tattler knows about their lawsuit threat. Quickly, PG&E told the police to inform us that they have had a change of heart. Now apparently they will not sue anybody that tries to paint over the graffiti on their building, and they want us to know that.
So now we know PG&E doesn’t care about our laws but they do care about bad press.
City Hall, PG&E and the Police Department: all are here to make sure we can’t have a nice place to live anymore. So we’re expecting more tags…..and more and more and more. Graffiti tags everywhere is what you get with the civic dysfunction that embodies the new Emeryville.
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| This is not the kind of thing that's solvable anymore, says the City of Emeryville. ‘Junior’ wants us to know he was here and who are we to take that away from him? |
