KIMBERLY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – The village of Kimberly is looking for the individuals responsible for vandalizing a popular pedestrian and bike tunnel.
Village summer staff members spent multiple days covering up old graffiti last week on the tunnel under Highway CE, but in less than one day, the murals were vandalized again.
“The words that have been added now and the vandalism that has been put over the top of this positive messaging, it really saddens me,” said Holly Femal, Kimberly’s community enrichment director.
In less than 12 hours of fixing all the vandalism in Kimberly’s CE Trail tunnel, someone decided to paint another round of profanity and other graffiti on the walls.
“This tunnel has had vandalism kind of all over from time to time,” said Hallie Dix, a village special summer assistant. “It just gradually gets worse.”
Dix tells FOX 11 mural painting is her passion since her grandma was a mural artist. She led the group of staff from Sunset Beach to cover up the graffiti last week.
“I love doing art. I came down, and I went over vandalism with an outline. That way people could color it in, like a color-by-number sort of thing.”
The vandalism cover up was a two-day effort done with paints from previous projects. Dix says she’s disappointed because of the time and effort that was put into the murals.
“I had to print off pictures, come down here and take pictures. Having to come down to outline it all, go through it with paint, set up clean up, everything that goes into it.”
“The tunnel allows safe crossing for people that are walking or biking,” said Femal.
Femal tells FOX 11 she’s upset this happened just weeks before the Fox Cities Marathon.
“We want the murals to be beautiful so that when you’re on that 20-plus mile run, you have something positive and exciting to see as you enter our Kimberly community.”
Kimberly hopes to put together a community mural painting effort before the Fox Cities Marathon. If you’d like to stay up to date on when that may be, check out the village’s social media pages.
The village says it’s actively partnering with Fox Valley Metro Police and the YMCA to find who’s behind the graffiti.
“It’s kind of one of those things that when you do that, it not only affects your community and us as the artists that did it but also themselves,” said Dix. “I don’t think they understand it puts a really bad rap on them.”
The village has partnered with Kimberly High School art classes and held community mural classes in the past to keep adding positive messaging to the tunnel and to cover up graffiti.
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