SPOKANE, Wash. — More and more graffiti and vandalism is popping up in Riverfront Park, posing a growing challenge to the limited park ranger staff.
Currently, only four full-time park rangers patrol Spokane’s entire park system, focusing mainly on the Riverfront Park area. Five temporary rangers provide additional support, but officials say it’s not enough.
“There’s graffiti vandalism that’s been an issue for us on a daily basis, we’re seeing that it’s hard for our maintenance staff to handle,” said Jacob Vandenberg, park ranger supervisor.
Rangers spend most of their time at Riverfront Park and the nearby area, A Place of Truths Plaza. A Place of Truths Plaza is covered with graffiti and spots where people have started fires, but cleaning the vandalism up across all of Spokane’s parks is expensive.
“It’s well over six figures when we look in our entire park system. So that is more than $100,000 that we can’t invest into improvements,” said Garrett Jones of Spokane Parks and Recreation.
The Parks Department is hoping the ‘Together Spokane’ levy on November’s ballot could change this situation. The $240 million measure would significantly expand the ranger program.
“We’ll be able to more than double that capacity around our park ranger program and have what we have in Riverfront Park, around our four full-time park rangers. We can have that as a precinct model in the northwest, northeast, downtown and also the south hill,” Jones said.
The levy would also fund more maintenance crews to repair and clean damaged areas faster.
Voters will decide on the Together Spokane levy this November.
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