I don’t tend to get bent out of shape about too many things. When the Split Fix started, at 10pm on the evening of Friday, May 4th, I thought, well this horrible noise is irritating, but it won’t be forever. (Still thinking that nearly 6 months later). When the orange barrels made it hard to back out of my driveway, I just started going the other way. I haven’t even complained too much about all of the new traffic on my street, with plenty of people who don’t even stop at the stop sign (sometimes six a day) and are going way over the posted speed limit of 25. It finally took some city workers getting nearly mowed down while working on the street to get a new ‘stop ahead’ sign put in a few weeks ago.
I haven’t even complained about the increase of heavy traffic and lost semi-trucks driving around.
But this latest thing really disturbs me.
You see, I care about this neighborhood. I clean up the trash. I pull weeds. I get rid of littering signs. I trimmed my neighbor’s bushes when they needed help. I shovel snow off of quite a bit of the sidewalks because I know there are people pushing strollers down them and also older people on my block. I even paid half of the cost to have a tree cleaned up that wasn’t even on my property, just for the beauty of the neighborhood.
We bought a home in the King Lincoln District nearly six years ago because we loved the architecture of the building and want to contribute to making sure it is preserved.
One thing I haven’t had to is clean up graffiti. Because there hasn’t been much (if any) and it’s not a problem.
Until yesterday.
That’s when ODOT put in new barricades on Spring Street and included four cement blockades, three of which have graffiti sprayed all over them.
I saw them being put in yesterday and they went in like that.
So I thought I’d hop on ODOT’s Facebook page for the I71/670 project and ask how long these ugly things were going to be up.
Their response? “I’m told the barriers were clean when they were installed and were graffitied by someone afterwards.”
Are you kidding me?
Unless the workers at Kokosing sprayed ugly tags all over them two minutes after they put them in, that did not happen.
They’re in a prominent location at a busy intersection. COTA routes go by them. School buses. Plenty of people taking their kids to daycare. Students going to CCAD and CSCC. Everyone has to look at these eyesores all day.
ODOT didn’t have any trouble finding plenty of clean cement blockades to line along the highway (see their Facebook page, or just drive around for reference photos).
I can appreciate well done graffiti. What I don’t appreciate are ugly tags uglifying a neighborhood that many are working to beautify and clean up, and then a false response from ODOT.
Shame on you ODOT. And extra shame for claiming they were graffitied after they went in.
UPDATE: 10/25/12: The graffitied barriers were replaced this afternoon. Thank you to ODOT for taking the time to do this.