Graffiti on a bridge on Mountain Bay State Trail in Howard on May 25, 2024. PC: Fox 11 Online
BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — To some, it may be art, but for others, it’s thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of work to clean: graffiti.
For weeks, a bridge on the Mountain Bay State Trail in Howard has been covered in graffiti.
“All it takes is one bad apple that disrespects and doesn’t have the capacity to appreciate what we have to offer for our community and wrecks it for everybody,” says Brown County Parks Director Matt Kriese.
Kriese, and the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, say the graffiti on the trail has been an issue for months.
“The main issue has been at the same spots right near the village of Howard, at one of our wooden decked bridges and one of our galvanized steel underpasses really is where it’s been an issue.”
Kriese says cleaning it up is costlier and more labor-intensive than you might think, too, especially on the wooden bridge.
“We ordered a special chemical from California which had minimal success, we tried pressure washing, special pressure washing rig with minimal success, we had staff attempt to scrape with wire brushes with minimal success, we have hours and hours, 20-30 hours or more of full-time staff trying to remove graffiti from an old wooden bridge and the final product we came up with is essentially to paint it,” he adds.
Vandalism like this is unavoidable to users on the trail, too.
“I just think they could use their talents and put it elsewhere,” says LouAnn Zegers who says she walks the trail at least once a week with her dogs. “It’s nothing that I really want to see.”
“If you’re that good of an artist, you know, draw something that has good intentions, not vandalize things that people enjoy,” says Debbie Ekberg, who walks the trail weekly, too.
The county has now covered up the graffiti and says they’ll continue to monitor the area weekly, as they do with every park in Brown County. Kriese says they use extra surveillance and cameras when necessary, too.
But for trail users like Ekberg, she’s taking a few extra precautions.
“I used to walk this trail by myself and I don’t anymore, I just do not feel safe anymore because of this stuff, I don’t really know what it means, you know.”
Thursday, the Brown County Sheriff’s Office confirmed a 20-year-old has been cited twice for the graffiti on the trail, once in February and once in April. Both times, he faced a $313 fine.
Along with the fines, Kriese is hoping the man will be ordered to pay restitution for the hours his staff members had to put in to remove the graffiti.
“When one person does this, they don’t understand the resources it takes away from our regular tasks to come back and correct this, and at the same time it never looks the same as it does when it done,” he says.
“We’re not going to tolerate it, we don’t have the resources as is to accomplish what we need to much less throwing a wrench of hours and hours of labor into something we don’t appreciate.”
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