Fed up with graffiti vandals they rarely catch, authorities have come up with a new way to bait informants into giving up taggers -- cash.

The Turn-In-A-Tagger program launched Tuesday will see tipsters receiving up to $500 in reward money for ratting out marker and spray paint-toting vandals.

In announcing the initiative aimed at teenagers and twentysomethings, Southern Nevada leaders repeatedly emphasized that graffiti should not be considered a form of self-expression on par with landscape painting or poetry.

"Graffiti is not art," Commissioner Rory Reid said, a theme later echoed by Sheriff Bill Young and other speakers at a news conference. "Graffiti is not cool. It's a crime."

To hammer that message into the heads of youngsters -- likely to be the best sources of incriminating information -- posters announcing the cash-for-anonymous-tips program will be plastered in 120 middle and high schools, as well as on a donated billboard.

Southern Nevada leaders are taking their war against taggers to new fronts in cyberspace.

An ad purchased by The Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors will publicize the reward program on MySpace, the online social networking site that is wildly popular among teens.

Also, the county's public service announcement touting the initiative will be uploaded to the online video-sharing site YouTube.

Graffiti has proved a continual headache for authorities, growing worse over the last decade despite almost continuous new programs aimed at abating the eyesore.

Las Vegas police arrest and cite about 300 people a year for graffiti vandalism, a fraction of the number of taggers defacing property valley-wide.

It costs an estimated $30 million in property damage annually, with much of the cleanup costs paid by taxpayers.

"It's disgusting," Commissioner Myrna Williams said Tuesday. "That money should be going toward positive things that are productive for the community."

Asked if police have done enough to crack down on the most-often reported property crime, Sheriff Young said law enforcement is somewhat hamstrung.

Part of the problem in prosecuting graffiti vandalism, he said, is the crime is treated as a misdemeanor unless there's more than $5,000 in property damage, which is rare. Convicts typically get a slap on the wrist, he said, because there's not enough jail space.

The Metropolitan Police Department plans to push a bill draft in the 2007 Legislature that would lower the threshold at which graffiti becomes a felony to only $400. That would make Nevada law mirror California's.

Making most graffiti crimes a felony also would make it easier for police to make arrests, Young said.

Police officers must witness a misdemeanor take place in order to cite or arrest a suspect. But to arrest someone on suspicion of a felony, police need only gather enough evidence to establish probable cause that a suspect committed the crime.

Young believes lawmakers will pass the proposal, which he believes also has widespread support among the public.

"People are forced to see this crap every day when they drive down the road," he said. "It is not art. Graffiti is the attempted marking of (gang members') turf."

The reward program will be administered by Crime Stoppers of Nevada, the non-profit group that operates the regional anonymous crime tip phone line at 385-5555.

Like the $2,000 rewards Crime Stoppers offers for information that leads to catching murderers, the $500 payments for graffiti tips are funded through community donations.

Detective Mike Hope with Crime Stoppers said potential graffiti tipsters do not have to reveal their identity to collect the reward.

They are assigned a case number, and if their information leads to an arrest, they meet with a Crime Stoppers representative and collect their payment in cash.

The reward program is part of the second phase of "Targeting Area Graffiti," the campaign launched in March by police, Southern Nevada governments, Realtors and other community partners.

Besides the cash rewards, officials also announced Tuesday that they are expanding the first phase's pilot program in which about 80 juvenile taggers convicted of vandalism have been sentenced to spend community service hours painting over graffiti.

Adult taggers also will be put to work cleaning up graffiti as part of their sentences, said James Bixler, chief judge of Las Vegas Justice Court.