In late September, nearly 100 people gathered to paint a brightly colored mural on the side of a Burlington building that for years has been a canvas for graffiti. By day’s end, cubes of orange, teal and lime spanned the brick facade at 266 Main Street, covering the illicit art.
Then overnight, someone defaced much of the new mural. The group rallied to cover it up, but the tagger returned the following day. Those tags have since been removed, and police have released surveillance footage of the offender in an attempt to identify him.
“We live in a beautiful city, and there is this reality of some really tough dynamics that have entered, and that’s hard,” said Brian McVey, who helped paint the mural with his kids. “The highs and the lows inside of a 12-hour period were sort of like, You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
Graffiti has long been a source of frustration to locals and Burlington business owners, particularly in recent years as the problem has become more pronounced. Its prevalence, some believe, reinforces the perception that the Queen City is lawless and unwelcoming.
Vandals can be hit with a $500 fine, but officials have not made enforcement a priority. Residents have tried to pick up the slack by organizing mural projects and cleanup days, but those efforts come and go.
In short, while those concerned say the problem will take concerted team efforts to solve, Burlington still lacks a comprehensive plan to tackle tagging.
Residents need to “feel like there is something they can rely on, rather than feeling powerless, which is what we hear a lot from people right now,” said Sam Donnelly, executive director of the nonprofit Building Burlington’s Future. “It’s a shared responsibility.”
Graffiti is found across the city, even on some Old North End homes, but downtown is the hardest-hit area. Illegible scribbles are found on street signs and on businesses, both open and closed, including the shuttered Nectar’s nightclub. “SALO,” the tag that defaced the Main Street mural, also appeared above a loading dock on South Winooski Avenue. Dumpsters and utility boxes seem to be favored spots for the ever-present “BUTT STUFF” tag.
Vacant buildings have been particular targets for defacement. And, like on Main Street, the vandals seem to have no qualms about tagging another person’s artwork, even though that’s typically a no-no in the street art community.
In 2020, Burlington police tallied 160 complaints about graffiti, but there are just 12 on record for this year — proof that the crime is “grossly underreported,” interim Police Chief Shawn Burke said. Police have not arrested anyone for graffiti this year, he said.
The city has undertaken various efforts over the years to tamp down the problem. More than a decade ago, the Burlington Community Justice Center operated a formal removal program in which offenders helped clean up graffiti. In 2021, the city dispatched a team of 10 cleaners to both public and private properties, but the coronavirus relief money that funded the program lapsed after two years. City councilors have spent discretionary funds, which are included in the city budget, on mural projects in the Old North End and downtown in recent months.
Burlington’s Department of Public Works estimates it has spent about $1,000 in staff time cleaning or replacing 90 street signs so far this year. The city’s Parks, Recreation & Waterfront Department typically spends about $10,000 per year on graffiti removal products, plus another $5,000 on paint. Year to date, parks staff have logged more than 100 graffiti complaints, with public restrooms, Fletcher Free Library and city buildings the most common targets.
Perhaps the most-tagged downtown structure is the city’s own Memorial Auditorium, which is next door to the building with the colorful new mural. In July, artwork was erected along the fence that surrounds Memorial in an effort to hide the graffiti. But that, too, was vandalized and ultimately removed.
“I don’t think there’s pride right now in this city, in the way it looks.”
Jana Qualey
Businesses on Burlington’s Church Street Marketplace get city help with graffiti cleanup, a service that’s supported by the fees they pay. On nearby College Street, Jana Qualey’s business, Home & Garden Vermont, has been tagged several times. Qualey has to eat the expense herself since her landlord doesn’t chip in. She estimates she’s funneled $4,000 over the past five years into graffiti abatement, a large expense for a business that sells small gifts, she said.
Qualey, who moved to Burlington from South Carolina in 2018, said she’s frustrated the city doesn’t do more.
“I don’t feel that it is a priority. I really don’t,” she said. “I don’t think there’s pride right now in this city, in the way it looks.”
During her campaign for mayor, Mulvaney-Stanak ran with a pledge to create a “robust graffiti removal strategy.” Shortly after taking office, she told WCAX-TV that she hoped to deploy city staff to clean up graffiti “block by block” instead of in a piecemeal fashion. But there’s been no plan at all.
Mulvaney-Stanak blames her inaction on budget pressures. Two years in a row, the city has faced multimillion-dollar shortfalls, leading the mayor to lay off 18 city workers this spring. Creating a new graffiti cleanup team “would be quite the lift” and isn’t going to happen, the mayor said.
Enforcing the city’s graffiti laws is up to the police department, which once had a Street Crimes Unit that would investigate quality-of-life crimes. But that team was eliminated after the city council voted in 2020 to reduce the size of the police force through attrition. With a roster of just 61 officers, cops only respond to the most pressing calls. Residents are asked to report vandalism using an online form.
Businesses that have been defaced will often submit surveillance images of vandals, but many wear masks or puffy clothing as disguises, Burke said. Even if cops can catch a tagger, it can be difficult to build a criminal case, he said. The charge would be under Vermont’s “unlawful mischief” law, which requires evidence that the graffiti damaged the surface on which it was painted.
That burden of proof is tricky, Burke said, “especially if it can just be taken away with a pressure washer.”
Other cities have adopted various laws and programs to combat tagging. In Anaheim, Calif., stores that sell aerosol paint must keep it behind the counter. The city will remove graffiti from private property but can charge offenders for the cost of cleanup. Phoenix has a similar law and also provides free paint to community groups willing to cover up tags. In Portland, Ore., city officials can place liens on properties whose owners fail to clean up graffiti within 10 days.
Burlington’s graffiti ordinance contains few of those provisions. Councilors recently debated the code but focused on a proposal that would have allowed people to sue one another for defacing public property with hateful messages. That idea was dropped, and there’s been no further discussion of increasing penalties for graffiti vandalism.
Mulvaney-Stanak is interested in rules similar to Portland’s, saying property owners should be held accountable for failing to maintain their buildings. She said such rules would pair well with the city’s newly bolstered vacant building ordinance, which can fine absentee landlords up to $6,000 per year.
“The goal is to get more people engaged in something that’s productive and positive.”
Sam Donnelly
In an interview with Seven Days, City Councilor Evan Litwin (D-Ward 7), who chairs a council committee focused on quality-of-life issues, floated a program that would allow offenders who commit any nonviolent crime to join a cleanup crew as a means of restorative justice. He hasn’t yet discussed the idea with his committee, saying other issues — including syringe litter — have taken precedence.
“You should repair the harm directly to the community that you harmed,” Litwin said. “If they can get out and clean graffiti and clean trash, that saves the city money.”
Grassroots groups are already banding together to beautify the city. The Peace & Justice Center has started the BTV Clean Up Crew, a weekly gathering of people who pick up trash and needles around town. Later this month, a group of University of Vermont students will tackle graffiti downtown as part of a community service project. Building Burlington’s Future, which advocates for public safety reforms, is organizing a new graffiti removal program that will launch in the coming weeks. The group will provide funding and supplies and use social media to promote the cleanups, which Donnelly hopes will happen at least twice a month.
“The goal is to get more people engaged in something that’s productive and positive,” he said. “What we hear from people who are part of those kinds of things is that they feel a little bit more hopeful about the direction of the city.”
But he also thinks the city itself should chip in, such as by organizing the events or directing the volunteers who show up.
Mulvaney-Stanak, some of her staff and city councilors were part of the crew that helped at the new Main Street mural. But the mayor isn’t convinced that the city should lead the efforts, particularly when a lot of the graffiti is on private property. Having volunteers work on public property introduces liability concerns, the mayor said, noting that the city has had to refuse community members’ help to spruce up Memorial Auditorium in the past. Still, Mulvaney-Stanak isn’t ruling out some sort of collaboration.
“There’s multiple ways people can also be part of the solutions here and not just expect the mayor and the city council to be the ones to come up with everything,” she said.
McVey, the dad who helped paint the mural on Main Street, thinks a more organized effort could make a difference. Driving home after working on that project, he took note of other graffiti downtown, including at Mr. Mikes Pizza, where someone spray-painted a bright red face on the building’s exterior. Compared to the Main Street building, covering tags that size would be easy, he said.
“Maybe what we’ll see is more small actions to go and clean this stuff up,” McVey said. “We’re too used to it. As people clean it up, we’ll get used to that, too, and we can make that our new normal.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Tag, Who’s It? | Burlington city officials have few strategies to crack down on unsightly graffiti”
This article appears in Oct 8-14 2025.
