The Helena Business Improvement District brought some mixed but mostly encouraging news to the City Commission on September 8: spray-painted graffiti on building facades and sidewalks in the Walking Mall and surrounding downtown blocks has been declining. BID Executive Director Alicia Ryan, presenting statistics compiled by BID Program Manager Abigail Dolan, called the trend "a glimmer of good news."
The picture isn't entirely clean. Smaller-scale tagging — stickers and posted flyers on lamp posts and walls — has actually increased. But Ryan drew a distinction between the two categories: spray paint on building faces and concrete is the more costly and labor-intensive problem to remediate, so the drop in that category carries real weight for property owners and the BID's maintenance budget.
The BID has been tracking graffiti removal data as part of its ongoing downtown maintenance program. Ryan did not provide specific incident counts at the meeting, but the directional trend she described represents a shift that downtown business owners and property managers along Last Chance Gulch will likely notice in reduced cleanup calls and costs. How long the trend holds — and whether the sticker-and-flyer category eventually translates into harder-to-remove tagging — remains to be seen.