LEWISTON – City officials announced Monday a new effort aimed at erasing the growing presence of graffiti from the city landscape.

Measures include:

• a downtown building wall dedicated to graffiti artists.

• stiffer penalties for new graffiti on non-sanctioned buildings.

• an amnesty/pledge program for prior offenders of the city’s anti-nuisance ordinance.

The new program springs from a campaign promise to preserve the city’s beauty by ridding it of blights such as graffiti, said Mayor Laurent Gilbert Sr.

“If allowed to continue, it sends the message you don’t care,” Gilbert said Monday. “If you leave it unaddressed, that’s what’s going to happen and it’s only going to grow, and so we wanted to address it.”

Gilbert said police have noticed a “significant increase” in the amount of graffiti scrawled across the city. City staff took a walking tour downtown to see firsthand the extent of the problem, he said.

Assistant City Administrator Phil Nadeau said vandals wielding spray cans have caused more than $250,000 in damage to the downtown. He called that a conservative estimate. Nationally, the U.S. Department of Justice estimated the problem in 2002 at a cost of $12 billion a year.

One of the ways the city plans to crack down on vandals is to pass a “graffiti violations” ordinance that would boost fines for offenders from $100 for a first-time offense to $500; the top fine, for third and successive offenses, would increase from $200 to $1,000.

The ordinance also would prohibit possession of so-called graffiti implements, such as aerosol paint containers, broad-tipped markers, gum labels, paint sticks or graffiti sticks, etching equipment brushes or any other devices capable of scarring or leaving visible marks on any natural or manmade surface.

Officials also extended an olive branch to local graffiti artists interested in having their artwork viewed by city residents. In exchange for registering their work with the city and signing a pledge not to vandalize in the future, they can have fines for past work forgiven, Gilbert said.

He said he recognized that not all graffiti vandals would be willing to turn law-abiding.

The side of a building facing a walkway connecting Lisbon and Park streets has been offered as a canvas by its owner, the nonprofit 12-Hour Club.

Graffiti artists can display their work on the building as long it’s free of obscenities and doesn’t refer to alcohol or drugs, Gilbert said.

The city also plans to work toward easing the task of cleaning graffiti from public property, such as bus shelters, an easy target for tagging, by using materials easier to clean or repaint.

Over the past months, city officials studied other programs launched in other municipalities and decided to use the model put in place earlier this year in South Portland.

“Our collective opinion is that we move forward and deal with graffiti in this manner,” Nadeau said. “We know it isn’t a perfect approach, but neither is doing absolutely nothing about what is going on. That certainly isn’t acceptable, either.”