Paid for by the Committee to Re-Elect Mayor Pat Morris 2009 - ID #1278701
Graffiti & Crime-Infested Housing

Mayor Pat Morris' action plan to eliminate graffiti and
crime infested housing in San Bernardino
After my election in 2006, there was an initial intense focus on reversing the rapidly escalating violent crime
in San Bernardino. With some success on violent crime under our belt, I turned my attention to addressing
quality-of-life crimes that also holds back our progress in improving our public safety and economy in San
Bernardino. My holistic "broken windows" approach to combating crime and increasing public safety has
been a hallmark of my administration beginning with the 18-point Operation Phoenix plan I published in
2005 and promised the voters to implement.

Based on my forty years of crime-fighting as a district attorney and judge, when I developed
the Operation Phoenix plan I knew that driving down the number of serious and violent
crimes in San Bernardino would be critical, but it would not be enough to accomplish the
mission. Successfully transforming San Bernardino into a safe and business-friendly city
requires a more comprehensive approach to public safety that combats graffiti, blight, and
crime-infested housing. That is why my Operation Phoenix plan calls for aggressive use of code
enforcement to clean-up blighted buildings and neighborhoods, the use of affordable housing funds to
eliminate crime-infested housing and increase home ownership, and the creation of civic beautification
programs to combat graffiti and blight on our streets.

Following is a summary of my implementation of these critical quality-of-life components of Operation
Phoenix in order to transform San Bernardino's image and reputation into a safe and clean city.

(1) ELIMINATE GRAFFITI. Elimination of graffiti must be one of our highest priorities, and in order to
"win the war" on graffiti, we must continue to professionalize our graffiti removal services. We have begun to
do this over the last nine months, and while we have a long way to go, the results of our progress are
beginning to show. Winning the war on graffiti requires a sustainable, consistent, accountable and professional
battle plan. This strategy has been successfully deployed in neighboring cities. We need the same plan and
results in San Bernardino.

Eighteen months ago, despite continued concerns from the Mayor and Council, it became clear the City was
losing the battle on graffiti. At that time, several council members and I urged the City Manager to closely
review the City's graffiti removal services performed by an outside contractor. After an extensive review of
the City's graffiti removal efforts and long discussions with the contractor, the following conclusions were
made by the City Manager: (a) the City was not deploying enough dedicated graffiti removal crews to
successfully combat the problem; (b) the graffiti removal contractor, while dedicated and hard-working, was
unable to account for how much graffiti was being cleaned-up, how much time it was taking, and how much
non-graffiti activities were being performed, (c) the outside contractor also did not have the ability to ensure
all graffiti removal would be done with consistent matching paint or other means to avoid paint stripes or
other remnants of graffiti removal that leave blighting impacts, and (d) in addition to the outside contractor,
three city departments were also performing various graffiti removal duties, but there was no coordination of
these efforts either internally or externally.

To address the problems of accountability, coordination, and professionalism, and to increase the amount of
work crews focused on graffiti removal, the Mayor and City Council approved the City Manager's
recommendation to bring graffiti removal in-house beginning January 2009, coordinate graffiti removal
through the Public Services Department, and augment the resources available to fight this problem. In
addition, the City Manager established a Graffiti Taskforce led by the Police Chief to ensure a coordinated
effort to arrest those responsible for graffiti crimes, to increase graffiti reporting, to expedite graffiti removal,
and to expand our anti-graffiti efforts by working with neighborhood organizations, community groups, and
businesses.

When graffiti removal services were first brought in-house in January 2009, there was a rough transition
period. First, a backlog of un-removed graffiti had accrued for several months when the outside contractor
stop performing work in late 2008. Second, the City was challenged to immediately hire and properly outfit
all the graffiti crews necessary to ensure good coverage seven-days-a-week. And finally, the balance between
responding to graffiti reports on the City's Graffiti Hotline and deploying proactive patrols along critical
corridors was being fine-tuned.

Since June, these issues have begun to be resolved, and the difference is starting to show. Make no mistake,
we have a long-road to travel before winning the war on graffiti, but we now have the sustainable, consistent,
accountable and professional battle plan needed for victory. Here are some of the critical statistics that
demonstrate the growing progress with our new plan and additional resources (collected through the city's
Constituent Response Management (CRM) system):
In January, February and March of this year, the average length of time for the City to respond to
graffiti reports ranged from 25 to 29 days. Since April, the City's response time has dropped
dramatically. Today, the average response time to graffiti reports is close to 24 hours.

The City's outreach efforts to increase the reporting of graffiti are beginning to show results. Since
January, calls for graffiti removal services have doubled.

The City receives graffiti removal requests both through the Graffiti Hotline (909-384-5250) and the
CRM system via the internet. Since January, 1,292 graffiti removal requests have been submitted by
residents through the CRM system, the City has completed 1,199 of these requests, and 998 customer
surveys have been completed by these residents. For effectiveness, timeliness, courtesy and overall
satisfaction, well over 80% of the survey respondents rated the City as meeting expectations or better
in every category.
(2) ELIMINATE CRIME-INFESTED HOUSING. Elimination of crime-infested housing must also be one
of our highest priorities. There is a significant amount of dilapidated and poorly managed housing in San
Bernardino that has been accruing for decades. Absentee and irresponsible property owners keep purchasing
these cheap rental properties and "milking" the property by renting at low rates and making only the minimal
repairs to avoid being shut-down by Code Enforcement. When the property becomes so rundown, these
landlords simply walk away, the property goes back to the bank, and it is once again sold-off at cheap prices to
the next bad landlord. It is a vicious cycle.

More concerning are the public safety implications associated with this housing cycle. Because there is
typically no on-site management and no desire of landlords to invest, these rundown and mismanaged housing
units can quickly be taken over by criminal elements, creating a hot-bed of criminal activity, destroying the
surrounding neighborhood and threatening our public safety. Every law enforcement official will tell you that
problematic housing is one of the significant issues contributing to crime in San Bernardino.

When I was elected in 2006, I was shocked to find the City had no person or staff directly responsible for
dealing with the complex and problematic housing issues in San Bernardino, and more concerning, the City
had no strategy or plan to proactively address these issues! At most, the City relied upon reactive strategies
like Code Enforcement or inspection violations. I found this situation simply unacceptable - the City needs
more tools in the toolbox to fix this problem. At my insistence, the Economic Development Agency director
recruited and hired an experienced housing professional to develop and implement a housing strategy focused
on proactive initiatives to cleanup crime-infested and problematic housing in San Bernardino, and increase
homeownership opportunities for our residents.

In 2008, the City unanimously adopted its first Integrated Housing Strategy. For the first time, the City has a
plan that establishes a comprehensive set of agreed upon objectives, policies, and programs to address the
housing issues in San Bernardino. Prior to adopting the Housing Strategy, the City had only a loose collection of
homeowner improvement and homebuyer assistance programs. By adopting an Integrated Housing Strategy,
the City has paved the way for much more aggressive actions that will begin to proactively remedy the
housing problems that have festered and grown for far too long.

The Integrated Housing Strategy contains several critical elements I pushed to have included to target the
problem of crime-infested housing: (a) a receivership strategy to identify and force the rehabilitation of
problematic housing through a court-appointed receivers; (b) a program that focuses on cleaning habitually
problematic multi-family housing identified by the Police and Code Enforcement departments through a
combination of acquisition, demolition, rehabilitation and accountable professional management, and (c) and
the augmentation of resources for these programs through aggressive procurement of grants, loans, and
federal housing funds.

Since the adoption of the Integrated Housing Strategy, the City has begun aggressive implementation. One of
the first projects is to remedy the crime-infested housing at Meridian and 5th Streets. This cluster of 18
multi-family buildings is surrounded by single-family homes and has been identified by the Police and Code
Enforcement departments as extremely problematic, with some buildings deemed uninhabitable. In addition,
a large number of these buildings are in foreclosure or bank-owned, which provides a critical opportunity to
acquire the properties at below-market prices. The City's Economic Development Agency has begun acquiring
and demolishing a number of the buildings with affordable housing funds. The plan is to tear down the
multi-family buildings and rebuild single-family residences that complement the neighborhood. The homes
will then be sold to income-qualified residents as required by law. This project will make a dramatic difference
in lowering crime in this neighborhood - an intelligent use of affordable housing funds.

The second project looks to achieve the same objective at the extremely dilapidated multi-family housing on
Sunrise and 19th Streets. Again, these buildings were identified by Police and Code Enforcement departments
as some of the most crime-infested housing in San Bernardino. For several decades, this housing has been
undergoing the vicious cycle described above of irresponsible management, foreclosure, and sale to another
irresponsible owner, while the building becomes more rundown and criminal elements take hold and destroy
the entire neighborhood.

Currently, many of the buildings at Sunrise and 19th Street are in foreclosure or bank-owned, providing a
window of opportunity to stop the vicious cycle. To take advantage of the window, the City approved using
federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to acquire the housing before it was sold once again to
irresponsible landlords. After acquisition, the City's plan calls for demolishing 60% of the multi-family housing,
and the development of senior housing and single-family homes. The remaining multi-family housing would be
completely rehabilitated and placed under a single professional management company that is accountable to
the City through covenants and legal documents to maintain strict tenant screening and best management
practices.

There is unfortunately terrible misinformation that these projects will actually increase the amount of
affordable housing in San Bernardino. Just the opposite is true. Both projects significantly decrease the
amount of housing, but more importantly, they get rid of crime-infested housing that has plagued the City for
decades. Rumors have also spread that new housing will be built at the Arden-Gurthrie area
where housing has been slowly demolished for more than a decade. This is absolutely not
true! The Arden-Guthrie site where the four-plexes were demolished is now zoned for commercial
development and the City is working with Home Depot on a prospective project.

Some have expressed the opinion that the City should not spend any money in these areas. There could not be
a worse decision for our public safety. Such inaction is exactly what has occurred for two decades and created
the nightmare that now needs to be cleaned-up. Sitting on our hands will only insure the same crime-infested
dilapidated housing that currently exists at these locations will simply continue and go on ruining the
surrounding community.

There is also terrible misinformation that we could these housing funds to simply tear down housing and leave
the property vacant. That is legally not permitted. Some housing can be demolished, but state and federal law
require some affordable housing to be maintained. Thus, the best solution is to rehabilitate any remaining
housing and place it under common professional management like is being done at Sunrise and 19th Streets to
ensure it is properly managed and maintained.

What we need to help solve our crime problem and restore our local economy is more proactive aggressive
strategies like those being deployed at the crime-infested housing at Meridian and Sunrise. What we do not
need is continued inaction and reactionary strategies that have been ineffective over the past twenty years.