PITTSBURGH -- The city of Pittsburgh spends over $250,000 a year cleaning up graffiti, but the city said it is working on a technique to lower that cost by making the clean up much easier.

The first thing you might notice as you walk along Brookline Boulevard is that there are a lot of local businesses. But the next thing that stands out is the amount of graffiti.

Sprayed next to and on just about every store along Brookline is graffiti.

"I think it's terrible that people destroy other people's property, especially because people are trying to make a living up here," said business owner Veronica Sanner.

Sanner has owned businesses in Brookline for 12 years.

Pittsburgh's graffiti busters moved through Brookline's business district though, wiping clean what vandals left behind.

Officials said Friday was Brookline's cleanup, but the problem spans the entire city and cleanup is a full-time, costly job.

"We spend upwards of $300,000 a year to remove graffiti," said Mayor Luke Ravenstahl. "We have crews out every day, but it is often times a challenge to keep up with."

But Ravenstahl said graffiti should not be a problem soon.

"It comes down to enforcement. It comes down to having a graffiti task force in place, which I am happy to say we have now," said Ravenstahl. "Three detectives that are assigned specifically to the taskforce, and it is their role, and they have state of the art cameras now that enable them to go from tag to tag and match up the individual tags, so hopefully the increased ability to do that will lead to more prosecutions."

Workers with Pittsburgh Public Works said they are testing a product now that they can put along the walls. If someone puts graffiti on that wall, they can just wipe it clean.

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