Seaside paints park walls and bridges “State Parks brown” to battle graffiti.

At Martin Park in Seaside on March 19, a city crew brushes mud-brown paint onto cinder-block retaining walls that were, for years, white.

They’ve covered all the carefully designed, neatly painted wall art by neighborhood kids: a California state flag, geometric shapes, a parade of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

At least one very small park-goer is crestfallen.

Maintenance worker Fernando Avila says the park has recently been hit with graffiti—not the kids’ art, but gang tags. He says the new color, which is called “State Parks brown,” makes it easier to cover up vandalism.

Tim O’Halloran, the city’s Public Works services manager, says the Seaside Board of Architectural Review approved the color change several years ago.

At first, O’Halloran says, the new brown hue was mostly limited to park signs. More recently, though, it’s been spreading to park walls and bridges.

Three weeks ago, city crews covered graffiti on Laguna Creek Bridge, connecting Seaside and Monterey in Laguna Grande Regional Park, by painting it State Parks brown.

“This way the city does not end up with checkerboard abated graffiti areas in the parks,” Deputy City Manager Diana Ingersoll wrote in a March 9 memo.

Maintenance crews followed up by painting walls in Sabado and Martin parks. But O’Halloran says the city doesn’t have any more browning plans in the near future.

“It’s kind of case-by-case,” he says. “If we have to paint it to cover up the graffiti, we’re going to want to paint it brown.”