ALBURY councillor Murray King has accused his own city of being more interested in "waffle" than seriously tackling graffiti.
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His comments came as the council agreed to distribute an updated draft graffiti management plan for public feedback.
The plan went to this week's council meeting and followed Wodonga's Lightbulb Consulting being hired to seek the views of the city's staff and councillors as well as 15 groups that included the police, Albury Business Connect, youth bodies and transport and rail bodies.
However, Cr King was unimpressed that not a single graffiti cleaner was part of the process, labelling it a "talkfest", and saying what he wanted to see was people employed to focus on removing scrawls.
"What I do see is waffle," he said.
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"The council has just increased their wages bill by millions of dollars, we're getting new people on staff, what I don't see is 'we got two people to work every day to go and clean graffiti off the walls of our city'."
Cr King also wants the council to be bold with Transport for NSW and the Australian Rail Track Corporation whose road and train items are often defaced.
"They've got assets but they're in our city and we need to go and clean them off and then send them the bill," he said.
"It's not difficult, we don't need to talk about it anymore, employ a couple of people, get a ute, go and clean it off and let's have a real proactive approach to wanton vandalism."
Councillor David Thurley was the only other representative to speak on the issue.
"(With the rail precinct) it's absolutely no doubt it's a disaster over there, but in general terms I think the city is getting it right and we just need to keep on the education campaign and keep working hard to engage young people who've got artistic talent to use it for good purposes," he said.
The draft plan, which will apply until 2026, notes that the council has distributed 110 graffiti removal kits to residents since 2015 and offered rewards of $2000 for information leading to prosecutions of vandals.
The survey done for the plan found 92 per cent believe Albury Council should provide spaces for legal street art, 80 per cent consider tags and scrawls as graffiti and 73 per cent think the city should assist in removing graffiti from private properties.
It also determined that respondents felt Albury did not have a major graffiti issue and such vandalism had not increased recently.
Public suggestions included the council advertising for vehicle dashcam footage of graffiti vandals to act as a warning and detection method and to call it malicious damage and promote it as a criminal offence.
