NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit discovers how a graffiti cleanup company is overbilling the city of San Jose.
By Jenna Susko, Julie Putnam and Jeremy Carroll ••
Southern California company overcharges for graffiti cleanup in the city of San Jose. The Investigative Unit finds hundreds of examples of exaggerated square footage, but city insists, “they do a great job.”
It’s writing on the wall you don’t want to see in your neighborhood.
We're talking about graffiti.
San Jose taxpayers are paying-up to take it down.
The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit found tax dollars may be going to a graffiti cleanup company for work they never performed.
That means they’re budgeted to clean about one and a half million square feet of graffiti each year.
Nine months into that contract, GPC says it has already exceeded that square footage. So we went through over 25,000 work orders to see exactly how your money is being spent. (All work orders can be found at the bottom of this story.)
Then we grabbed a tape measure and checked the simple, but important math.
Take two swings in a city park: how many square feet?
Folks who spoke with us guessed between one and two. They were right. We measured them: about one square foot each.
“Does it upset you that they are overcharging the city and ultimately taxpayer dollars are being wasted?” Investigative Reporter Jenna Susko asks Julie Edmonds-Mares, the Acting Director of Park, Recreation and Neighborhood Services.
“Well, I disagree with you Jenna,” Edmonds-Mares responds., “you’re stating something I disagree with.”
Edmonds-Mares oversees the graffiti-abatement program for the city.
“I don’t believe GPC is overcharging the city,” she says.
And that’s after we showed her our findings.
“A swing,” Susko hands Edmonds-Mares the photo of the tagged swing, “ 40 square feet. Two swings to be rinsed off.”
“Well again, I’d have to check, double check the square feet, square footage,” Edmonds-Mares responds.
“This one is a sign sticker on a stop sign,” Susko shows Edmonds-Mares this other photograph from a GPC work order, “They say that's five square feet. The whole stop sign isn't five square feet.”
“Uh-huh,” Edmonds-Mares pauses, “right.”
We crunched the numbers.
Records from the past nine months show 83-percent of the sign stickers removed are charged as being five square feet. That’s 384 stickers out of 465 total removed from the end of June through the end of March.
”All of those sign stickers are 5 square feet” Susko says.
“Well a sign is,” Edmonds-Mares begins to reply, “I’m not an expert on square footage.”
It’s a stark contrast from six years ago when San Jose's anti-graffiti program was nationally known for bringing graffiti down to 129 tags citywide.
“When you drive down the street and see you see it on every other light pole and every fourth utility box, it’s a problem,” Rick Stanton tells NBC Bay Area.
Stanton ran the program that grabbed national attention. He’s now a graffiti consultant for cities across the country.
Stanton tells us, city workers used to paint over just the graffiti, but not anymore.
Under the new “restoration model” GPC workers are instructed to paint an entire wall when there is an individual tag.
It’s called beautification.
The idea is that next time that same wall is tagged, workers will already have a matching color of paint to cover it up.
However it means a lot of large walls getting completely covered in fresh paint and GPC is getting paid by the square foot to do it.
Stanton disagrees with it.
“The wall looks good when you’re done but now you’ve earned a lot of money painting over other colored paint instead of graffiti,” Stanton tells NBC Bay Area.
“Our company spot checks billings on a regular basis and have consistently found that the net result yields an under billing as opposed to over billing,”
We also went by the address listed for GPC in Los Angeles to talk to them in person. Turns out, it’s a PO box.
San Jose City Council will review the city's Anti-Graffiti Program in their meeting on Tuesday, May 1.
