A deluded urban myth attempts to portray graffiti vandals as artistic rebels whose decorative contributions brighten drab cityscapes. But it is doubtful whether many San Franciscans feel civic pride when they see The City streets defaced with ugly graffiti — on building walls, storefronts, bus stops, Muni vehicles, commercial trucks, signs, highway structures or just about any spray-paintable surface. Particularly offensive is when impressive public murals are obscured by sloppy scrawls.

The ugly truth is that for every one of the handful of graffiti vandals who get anointed as underground stars by art-gallery owners and media critics, thousands upon thousands of clueless taggers are busily blighting our cities with gross scribbles. In 2007, The City’s estimated cost for graffiti cleanup was more than $20 million, and some 800,000 square feet of surfaces at 30,000 locations needed erasing.

But now all of California — and San Francisco especially — has powerful new weapons to fight back against those who would disfigure metropolitan environments. On Wednesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law two correlated bills emanating independently from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Assembly Bill 1767, authored by Assemblymember Fiona Ma, D-San Francisco, empowers our municipal courts to close a significant loophole in graffiti penalties.

Typically, the first two times San Francisco graffiti perpetrators get caught, they — or their parents — will settle the cases out of court by paying property owners the costs of removing the graffiti. This lets the taggers escape a court appearance on misdemeanor vandalism charges as well as any personal performance of graffiti cleanup. Only on the third offense must serial taggers go before a judge and, if convicted, perform community service graffiti removal.

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Ma’s bill establishes a San Francisco pilot program requiring even those taggers who successfully settled their cases out of court to be sentenced for community- service graffiti-cleanup hours. This supplements The City’s earlier 2008 program offering up to $250 as reward for information leading to arrest and conviction of a tagger.

The other new anti-graffiti law, authored by Los Angeles Assemblymember Mike Davis, applies to the entire state. It requires all California courts to sentence convicted taggers to remove the actual graffiti from the property they vandalized — and to clean up all tags at that site for as long as a year. Substitute community service may be ordered only if direct cleanup at the vandalism scene is not considered feasible.

Since San Francisco already enforces community service for those convicted of graffiti, that aspect is not applicable here. But The Examiner very much likes the statewide law’s emphasis on taggers keeping the site of their own graffiti cleaned up for one year. We want to see this requirement actively added to The City’s other anti-graffiti penalties.