Trash and graffiti piled up in Tacoma during COVID-19. What’s the city doing about it?
When Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee converged on Wright Park in late June to celebrate the city’s reopening after 15 long months of COVID-19 restrictions, they did so with predictable political exuberance and optimism.
There were obstacles ahead, both cautioned — like the need to continue vaccination efforts and lift up those who’ve suffered the most, including many small businesses — but it was time to get back a semblance of normal, they told a crowd of gatherers ready to hear the good news.
One challenge that might have been easy to overlook? The physical task of cleaning up.
In Tacoma, it’s going to be daunting.
More than a year after the coronavirus pandemic brought much of the city to a halt, Tacoma finds itself facing a backlog of garbage and blight that will likely take months to address, city officials acknowledged this week in separate interviews with The News Tribune.
Litter has festered along arterial roads, in large part because COVID-19 essentially shut down court-ordered community service work programs, according to the city’s Public Works Department.
Tagging and graffiti have proliferated on un-watched buildings, particularly on the Eastside and in the South End, according to Tacoma’s Neighborhood and Community Services department.
Meanwhile, what representatives from the city’s environmental services division describe as a perceived increase in illegal dumping has combined with Tacoma’s homelessness crisis — and the large encampments that now fill downtown sidewalks and planting strips — to create the appearance of a city that’s dirtier and less cared for than any point in recent memory.
Even the freeways have more trash to pick up, according to members of a state Department of Ecology cleanup crew interviewed Tuesday working in Tacoma. Alex Hoffman, the crew’s supervisor, said trash collection has roughly doubled in recent months.
While not every issue is purely pandemic related, many of them are, and as Tacoma emerges from COVID-19, there are a host of unforeseen impacts that are demanding the attention of city staff.
It’s urgent work, according to Tacoma City Council member Catherine Ushka, who represents the Eastside — where many of the problems are most pronounced.
It comes down to quality of life and feeling safe in your own neighborhood, she said.
“I think it’s very important — getting back to that pre-pandemic level so that we can move forward together,” Ushka said of the city’s developing effort to clean up as it reopens.
“People don’t just need to recover. They need to have a sense of recovery.”
Litter piling up
If it seems like there’s more litter than usual along Tacoma’s main thoroughfares, that’s because there is, according to Rae Bailey, division manager of the city’s public works street operations department.
Normally, Bailey said, the city relies on referrals from Tacoma Municipal Court to staff the work crews it uses to clean up litter in these heavily trafficked areas. When the pandemic hit, the flow of court-ordered community service labor essentially disappeared, Bailey said.
The results have been predictable. In 2019, the city utilized 684 people performing community service to remove roughly 140,000 pounds of litter from city streets. In 2017 — the busiest year for litter removal in the five-year snapshot of data the city provided — 818 individuals helped to collect more than 171,000 pounds of trash.
Last year, the number of referrals from municipal court dropped to 45, resulting in just over 100,000 pounds of litter being collected. And from Jan. 1 to the end of April of this year, there were only five referrals from the court, and just under 28,000 pounds of trash was collected.
Bailey told The News Tribune that the results of this reduction in labor can definitely be felt around Tacoma. Without the work of community service work crews, the city has just two supervisors on staff tasked with litter collection.
“Along our arterial streets, you’re definitely seeing a lot more litter,” Bailey said. “We’re not really hearing more complaints, but we’re seeing it.”
As the court system begins to emerge from COVID-19, Bailey said he’s hopeful the situation will begin to improve.
He’s just not sure when that will happen.
“I have no idea,” Bailey said about when litter collection in Tacoma will return to pre-pandemic levels.
“Hopefully in the next couple of months.”
‘Significant increase’ in graffiti
According to Ushka, the battle against graffiti and tagging is one residents of the Eastside know all too well.
That’s what makes the current uptick the city is experiencing so disheartening, she said.
For years, residents in her neighborhood have kept closets full of paint and organized community cleanups to fend it off. Now, “it feels like we’ve gone backwards,” Ushka lamented.
There’s good reason for the sentiment and frustration, based on records of graffiti and tagging cases throughout the city provided to The News Tribune. Tacoma is in the midst of its largest spike since 2016, according to the data. There has also been a “significant increase in graffiti cases” since 2018, according to city staff accounts provided to The News Tribune by Tacoma spokesperson Megan Snow.
In the first two quarters of 2018 — when Tacoma signed its most recent contract for graffiti and tagging removal services — the city opened a total of 108 graffiti cases. During the same time frame this year, there were 181 cases opened.
Where the preponderance of tagging and graffiti is taking place is also reason for concern, according to Vicky McLaurin, a manager with the city’s Neighborhood and Community Services department who has oversight of the city’s graffiti removal program.
In the first quarter of 2021, over 70 percent of graffiti cases were in City Council Districts 4 and 5, which make up Tacoma’s Eastside and South End, McLaurin noted.
Equity concerns are one reason the city is taking the situation so seriously, McLaurin said.
“We do notice that the fourth district and the fifth district …. were hit hardest. We also recognize that in those districts, sometimes they receive less services, and so we are trying to target that area” for cleanups, McLaurin said.
A lack of graffiti cleanup during the COVID-19 pandemic is part of the problem, McLaurin said. While it’s unclear whether the level of graffiti and tagging actually increased in 2020 and the early part of 2021, McLaurin noted that pandemic-related belt tightening temporarily resulted in the city cutting its cleanup budget earlier this year. The city’s Code Enforcement Department also stopped issuing citations last March due to COVID-19 and has yet to resume.
To help stem the tide, McLaurin said, Tacoma restored its graffiti-removal budget — which is roughly $200,000 per biennium, she said — to previous levels earlier this year. The city also recently finalized a contract with an additional graffiti-removal service provider this month in hopes of ramping up efforts.
There are preliminary plans to use $250,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funding for graffiti-removal services in the coming months, McLaurin added.
It’s worth the money, she believes.
“Graffiti gives the impression of a neighborhood being oppressed and being crime ridden, even if it’s not. And so by removing the graffiti, it improves the property values, but also the environment in that community and the culture in that community, and it makes the community feel more safe,” McLaurin said. “We want people to feel safe in their neighborhoods, and we want them to also not feel like the city’s not providing resources in their communities, and like they don’t matter. They do matter to the city.”
In the end, McLaurin hopes it will be an effective, temporary response to the problem, and also one that informs how the city prioritizes graffiti removal in the future.
“As a program manager, my job is to make sure that this doesn’t happen again … or it doesn’t get to this place again,” McLaurin said.
Encampment cleanups and illegal dumping
Unavoidable in all of this is the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis.
In some ways, it complicates matters, muddying the picture of where the trash in Tacoma’s streets is coming from and how it’s getting there.
In other ways, it helps bring the problem into focus.
Between March and July 8, contractors hired by the city to clean up waste associated with homelessness encampments collected more than 100 tons of it — or 200,000 pounds, according to data provided to The News Tribune.
While city spokesperson Megan Snow could not provide comparable data to a previous year, she did say that Tacoma has put a heavy emphasis on removing as much garbage as possible from homeless encampments over the last 15 months. It’s a health and human safety issue, Snow said, and also one necessitated by Tacoma’s adherence to homelessness-related CDC guidelines, which have discouraged the displacement or removal of encampments during the pandemic.
“The encampment strategy shifted during 2020 to address the pandemic. We are still following CDC recommendations and as those evolve as the pandemic restrictions are lifted, we are anticipating that our approach may need to shift again. What that will look like will depend on shelter availability, health and safety and other factors,” Snow wrote via email.
“We continue to respond to and understand the health and safety impacts encampments create for people living in and around them due to garbage accumulation and a lack of basic hygiene services,” she added. “We are (also) continuing to work on finding alternative options for people who need shelter and services that can accommodate people who may not want a traditional shelter option.”
On the Eastside, Ushka said, the increase in garbage she sees in her neighborhood seems like more than can be explained by homelessness or the crisis of individuals forced to live outside. While it’s largely anecdotal, she said, the number of abandoned couches and other household items she and her constituents have recently encountered points to an increase in illegal dumping — which is also an issue she knows well.
According to Lewis Griffith, a solid waste division manager for the city’s Environmental Services Department, the data on illegal dumping calls maintained by the city — which attempts to separate those complaints from those related to homelessness — doesn’t reflect a significant increase.
At the same time, Griffith acknowledged that illegal dumping has long been a problem on the Eastside and South End, and it’s one the city takes seriously.
While it can be difficult to determine the source of garbage, it’s much easier to tell when it’s piling up, he said
To Ushka, that’s how it feels, and together with the increase in graffiti and tagging it brings back bad memories.
“There’s been more than 20 years of effort in this community just for basic cleanliness,” Ushka said. “We know each other because we’ve gotten together to paint over graffiti and to pick up trash and everything else.”
“I want to get to the place where our quality of life is such that we are getting together because we’re having a barbecue to celebrate somebody’s accomplishment, not because there’s trash on our streets that is outside of our control,” she added.
This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
