The Orange County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed Tuesday to spend up to $25,000 through June to help clean up a wave of taggers' handiwork in unincorporated Midway City.

Orange County has no-graffiti program, and the problem in unincorporated areas has traditionally been tackled by volunteers, said Supervisor Charles Smith. He proposed tapping into the city of Westminster's long-established program and paying the city to handle the problem in Midway City.

Under the agreement, the county would pay Westminster $42 an hour for work and $10 a gallon for paint, and Midway City residents could use Westminster's hotline to report graffiti.

Smith said volunteers have worked "very, very hard to remove the graffiti." But "just recently, they've been hit so hard that it's just too much to ask the volunteers to take care of it, and we certainly can't afford to start and go out and buy the equipment to have a graffiti removal program."

"Based on the amount of graffiti and our estimates of what it would take, I'm asking the county to make available (funds) not to exceed $25,000 for the balance of the fiscal year and at the same time, I'm asking staff to look at the additional county islands to see if they've got a problem there and what we might do about that problem."

But before a vote, Supervisor Tom Wilson shifted the discussion to whether programs like graffiti removal should be equally allocated in all districts.

Wilson, who acknowledged that the problems may be worse in some communities, represents the Fifth District, which mostly lies in less urbanized south Orange County.

He suggested delaying the vote to ask county staffers to "address this as a total county package instead of just focusing on one area (where it has) been identified as being rather serious."

But Supervisor William Campbell said he is meeting soon with a group of residents in the unincorporated El Modena area, and "I may be coming back and asking for the same kind of support for one of my areas, too."

"The way I view this, this really is a pilot project... that will do some good," Campbell said. "It's going to clean up (graffiti in Midway City) for at least six months. It will give our county staff a style of working with a city to help take care of a county problem without staffing up to do it."

Supervisor Chris Norby said he saw no problem with putting the funds where needed.

"This is going to start in a particular area of Orange County, and I could argue that we should have equal funding throughout the entire county in all five supervisorial districts, but the needs vary," he said.

"Certainly Supervisor Smith's district has not received equal park funding as other districts have. And if they get a little extra for graffiti removal, I think it should meet the needs that are there and if later on areas like El Modena or Coto de Caza or Modjeska Canyon have the same need, then we would address those, as well, on an as-needed basis."

Smith said the problem "is so obvious, we can't wait."

Wilson said he supports the program starting out on a "pilot" basis and was only suggesting that graffiti may need to be dealt with on a countywide basis.