A West End man may have to pay $18,000 to remove graffiti from his warehouse or risk the city of Cincinnati placing a lien on his property, under a new rule council members quietly passed in 2024 that pushes cleanup costs to taxpayers.
Rory Benson has lived in a historic warehouse on York Street for more than a decade. Vandals occasionally tagged it with graffiti, but until recently, city crews always cleaned it up without being asked.
“Around 2000, in the middle of COVID, it just stopped. I would call, I would get no response,” Benson said. “I thought there were delays just because of COVID … and it was a few years before someone finally said, ‘Hey, we just don’t do that anymore.’”…