City fights downtown vandalism
Vandalism is an issue in El Centro Downtown. City officials said they’re meeting it head-on.
Mayor Cheryl Viegas-Walker said, “Highest citation rates, arrests rates we have is vandalism. What we’re doing to combat that, and it’s an ever-growing problem that we need to address, we’ve increased lighting downtown.”
There’s an armed security guard at the bus transfer station as of October this year.
“We’re seeing a lot of good results having somebody there full-time at the transfer station,” Viegas-Walker said.
And the city plans to hire three new police officers.
“So that we bring up the number of officers available to respond to whatever’s going on, whether it’s downtown or somewhere else,” Viegas-Walker said.
City Building and Safety Code Enforcement Supervisor Frank Soto said often vacant or neglected buildings attract vandalism.
“Property owners live somewhere in San Diego and L.A. and they really don’t care about it down here. And that was one of our biggest problems that we were having with unsecured buildings. They’re attracting nuisance, they harbor criminal activity,” Soto said.
Viegas-Walker encourages concerned downtown business people to take action.
“If you see a realtor’s name on an empty building and that building is not being maintained, you call that real estate broker and say, you know what, get down here and get this building cleaned up,” Viegas-Walker said.
They can also become health hazards, such as in the case of extensive bird droppings on the sidewalk. Building owners or tenants are required to clean that up.
“When you see something please report it to the city so that our code enforcement officer can go out,” Viegas-Walker said.
The web portal to report violations is at www.cityofelcentro.org. You will need to navigate to the section’s Doing Business, Building, and Construction, and Code Enforcement Division to get to the File Complaint option.
“So, then it gets tracked as to date, time, and the response as well,” Viegas-Walker said.
She added that city officials plan another boots-on-the-ground walk along downtown, just like they did recently; to make sure their strategies are working.
