Spokane downtown Pride mural isn’t going anywhere, community vows

The scooter wheels left black scuff marks across the entire mural. Speaking to RANGE as he observed the new damage to the mural for the first time, Oberst said tire marks from Lime scooters are especially hard to clean.

“The wheels are actually made of a particular compound that is really, really terrible when they burn out on public art,” he said. “If you scrub it, it would take forever.”

Because of the nature of the damage and the cost of closing streets safely for repainting, Oberst and Danielson jointly decided to leave the damage intact, at least through Pride weekend, which was last weekend. “I wish I had a better answer for you, because I would love to have it right like yesterday,” Oberst said. “But it’s not going to be the case.”

Oberst said he and Danielson plan to propose a community service program for the young vandals to scrub graffiti on public art and public buildings as a “learning opportunity.”

“It sends a powerful message of who we are as a community. This is not punitive,” Oberst said. “Restorative justice is who we are. We would welcome an extra set of hands for graffiti abatement downtown.”

On Thursday, as he watched the final steps of the mural repainting, Danielson told RANGE that despite the repeated vandalism, he was proud of the community’s support for the project as a whole. “It’s clearly like a very small percentage of people that are not OK with Pride stuff,” he said. “The entire community spoke in raising all this money in three days.”

As the painters worked, a few drivers and pedestrians had shouted obscenities at them from car windows or the sidewalk throughout the day, according to the painters.

But, Patterson said, “for all of the terrible people saying horrible things, there’s ten times more positive people. And the people that stop and thank us is so surprising. It’s people you wouldn’t expect. And people will drive by and roll down their window and scream ‘Thank you!’ … The community shows up and it’s very apparent that the people that are for it are greater [than those against it].”