At its meeting last week, city council approved a new graffiti management plan, designed to address Mayor Ford's campaign promise to bring vandalism under control. Of all the new plan's provisions, the one with perhaps the best chance of establishing a lasting peace between property owners and spray-can aficionados is a recommendation to revamp an old City grants program known as the "Graffiti Transformation Program."

Founded in 1996, the program currently pays out about $350,000 a year in grant money to 20 different local arts and community nonprofits, who use it to hire youth to paint murals on exterior walls around the city. City staff say that 9,000 tags have been removed under the program's auspices, and that 430 murals have been painted in their place.

The program, in theory, attacks graffiti on two fronts: it gives bored youth who might otherwise turn to vandalism real work experience, and covers walls with beautiful street art that taggers won't mess with.

The new graffiti plan calls for the program to be transferred to the Public Realm section of Transportation Services, so civil servants will be better able to coordinate it with the rest of the City's graffiti abatement activities, including enforcement. Starting in fiscal year 2012, Elyse Parker, director of that section, will be assuming responsibility for giving out the money.

The plan also calls for the program's existing City subsidy to be augmented with private dollars, and Parker says she's already looking at ways of bringing that about.

"We don't know yet how much we're going to be able to raise," she said. "We plan to be in touch with potential donors who would be interested in the arts, in youth, and in community development and improvement." Discussions, at this point, are preliminary.

Parker believes the City subsidy for graffiti transformation will remain stable for the time being. But with the municipal government under pressure to curb unnecessary expenditures, there's a chance the program will face cuts at some point soon.

Aside from dealing with the money situation, Public Realm will be trying to coordinate the program more closely with the strategic interests of neighbourhoods, possibly at the level of neighbourhood BIAs.

"They might want to help create murals in a particular place to prevent illegal graffiti," said Parker. "For example, creating a graffiti alley of their own within a particular BIA." Designating legal graffiti alleys is something the new graffiti plan explicitly allows.

One of the 20 organizations that currently receives grants through the program is Art Starts, a community arts organization with citywide reach.

Art Starts received $19,000 this year, with which they were able to hire four youth, plus a lead artist, to complete a street art project this summer. Tamara Haberman, Art Starts' director of development and administration, sees the merit in involving private businesses in the program.

"If there were more funding, we could do more walls," she said. "We could also do larger walls. And we could hire more youth." They turn away kids every year.

She isn't sold on the notion of allowing business to influence the program on any levels other than the purely financial. "I would be a little concerned about artistic freedom," she said. "It's preferable that we not have to limit our scope."

A motion by Councillor Janet Davis (Ward 31, Beaches-East York) to restrict the use of "corporate branding" in sponsored murals and art programs was defeated at council, so the door remains open to certain types of private-sector meddling.

Parker, for her part, says the exact terms of sponsorships have yet to be finalized. As an example of what the program might become, she points to Philadelphia's 27-year-old Mural Arts program, which in 2011 received only about half of its $7.5 million income from government, with the rest coming from other sources.