Las Vegas Rapid Response Team member Jessie Hill paints over graffiti on a wall near Bonanza and Pecos roads. Photo by Gary Thompson. Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

It occasionally changes color or shifts shape overnight.

Sometimes it disappears.

But the eyesore always returns to unnerve Sheriff Bill Young as he's driving along U.S. Highway 95, approaching Rainbow Boulevard.

"I get so sick and tired of looking at this stuff on the Rainbow curve," the sheriff said Wednesday, referring to a giant mass of graffiti on the overpass there. "They paint over and fix it, and somebody just climbs up there and does it again."

Young is not alone in his frustrations. Southern Nevada governments expend millions of dollars and thousands of gallons of paint each year cleaning up after graffiti vandals who tag buildings, bridges, lampposts and just about anything else that stays still long enough to be sprayed.

Fed up with a relentless and losing battle, Young and other Metropolitan Police Department leaders are pitching a new way to crack down on taggers: They want to throw the book at them.

A bill draft the department has prepared for submittal to the state Legislature proposes making graffiti vandalism a felony crime punishable by one to four years in prison.

Currently under Nevada law, graffiti vandalism is a misdemeanor unless the tagger causes more than $5,000 in property damage, at which point it becomes a felony. By comparison, theft becomes a felony at a threshold of $250.

"You've got to paint a lot of stuff to get to $5,000, so they get a ticket generally," Young said.

The bill the Metropolitan Police Department is asking legislators to approve in 2007 would slash the felony threshold to $400 in property damage.

Young said he doesn't really want to send teenage taggers to already overcrowded prisons. Instead, he wants a penalty that will intimidate would-be graffiti artists from ever picking up a spray paint can.

"It will give us a little bit more of a hammer over them," the sheriff said.

Young believes first-time offenders should be sentenced to community service and spend hours abating graffiti. Second-time offenders should receive house arrest and community service, he said, and by the third-time, "let's go to 30 days in jail."

While Mayor Oscar Goodman has endorsed more extreme methods for dealing with graffiti vandals, such as placing them in stocks or lopping off their thumbs, Hizzoner's on board with the police proposal.

"A great idea," Goodman said. "If there's one thing I'm asked about most by constituents, it's, 'What can we do about graffiti?'"

Unsurprisingly, the municipal government workers charged with abating graffiti are also throwing their support behind the measure.

"We need to relate to the vandals that this is a serious crime, and this is a good tool to do that," said county chief of code enforcement Joe Boteilho, who oversees five painters who went through 17,000 gallons of paint covering up graffiti over the last year.

The Nevada Department of Transportation is preparing a budget that includes $300,000 to retrofit five bridges with fences designed to keep taggers out. The Transportation Department is also investing in "pre-coating" paint that eases graffiti removal at a cost of $40 a square yard.

"We really can't keep up with them," said Transportation Department assistant district engineer Joe Martinez, who called the felony proposal "a good step."

The local defense bar is less enthused with the proposal.

"If we lower that threshold to $400, which would make every single graffiti incident a felony, we're going to create a whole new class of felons," Clark County Public Defender Phil Kohn said. "And we're not going to solve the problem."

Kohn said he's no fan of graffiti. "But you can't scare a 16-year-old by saying we're upping the penalty. It does not scare people off because no one thinks they're going to get caught," he said.

Kohn said prosecutors already have enough of a hammer: A misdemeanor graffiti charge is punishable by up to six months is jail.

Therefore, he said, the only real effect of lowering the felony threshold is adding to offenders' criminal records a mark that will follow them for life.

"They have to be punished," Kohn said, "but if you put a felony on their record and keep them from getting a decent job and they turn to drugs or robbery, and then we'll have a real criminal on our hands."

Although Kohn believes a felony is too harsh a penalty for graffiti, the proposal would bring Nevada's laws in line with California, a state that usually has more lenient criminal penalties.

In the Golden State, graffiti damage of $400 or more can be punished as a felony by up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $50,000.

The proposed felony penalty is only one of several changes the department is seeking to make to Nevada graffiti law, according to a copy of a bill draft request provided by Police Department lobbyist Stan Olsen.

Las Vegas police also are seeking to make tagging an emergency vehicle, traffic control device, school or college building, place of religious worship or graveyard a felony even when the property damage is less than $400.

Another section of the request proposes charging any person possessing a "graffiti implement" near an underpass, bridge abutment, flood channel, park, playground, public swimming pool, community center or other public building with a misdemeanor.

Still, none of the changes address what has frustrated District Attorney David Roger about Nevada's graffiti law.

Even if a tagger exceeds the current $5,000 threshold and is convicted of a felony, state law mandates that the one-to-four year prison sentence be suspended and the defendant serve mandatory probation.

"If an individual has a history of destroying buildings," Roger said, "he should be facing prison time, not mandatory probation."