More than a dozen incidents of graffiti appeared overnight Wednesday in what appears to be an escalating effort to blight downtown Oak Harbor.

Bright pink images and words marked the walls around a Dock Street parking lot and many nearby businesses were tagged, including Bayshore Chiropractic and Carla’s Shear Inspiration.

Similar tags appeared at other Pioneer Way businesses and locations such as Perla’s Oriental and buildings at the intersection of Dock and Fidalgo streets.

Kathy Collantes said the sea of graffiti she saw out her window Thursday morning appeared overnight.

However, similar graffiti appeared last week in the same parking lot, but were painted over a few days ago, said Collantes, a broker with Go Realty.

Since then the tags appeared at Perla’s, and a vehicle parked along Pioneer was tagged leading up to Wednesday night’s tag-fest.

The City of Oak Harbor was scheduled to repaint the parking lot Friday. Estimating the cost to the city is difficult because it appears to be an ongoing project, according to Debbie Mueller with the city’s public works department.

But as a point of reference, Mueller said the city has been working on graffiti mitigation at Fort Nugent Park for the past week and a half.

“The park was ‘hit’ several times and the cost has amounted to approximately $1,270,” Mueller said.

The city’s Parks Division’s cost to mitigate vandalism, which includes graffiti, in 2014 was more than $3,500, Mueller said.

“If the perpetrators are not caught soon,” Mueller said, “the city will surely go over that amount in 2015.”

The expense of cleaning up the graffiti on nearby buildings falls on the individual business owners who are affected.

“It’s aggravating,” said local attorney Chris Skinner, who is part owner of the building housing Go Realty. “Our concern is the longer it stays up, the more gratifying it is for them. It makes Oak Harbor look junky.”

For that reason, Skinner said he and the other property owners plan to cover the tags as soon as possible.

Dawn Keith-Madeiros, owner of Bayshore Chiropractic and the building, was hesitant to discuss the incidences of vandalism because she didn’t want to reward bad behavior.

“I hate to promote and give attention to those who have done all this — but we will definitely be putting up security cameras and there will be more police patrols,” Keith-Madeiros said.

A different style of graffiti has appeared in recent months in the men’s restroom at the Old Town Mall. The bathroom doors have since been locked to non-patrons in an attempt to curb the vandalism there.

Oak Harbor Detective Sgt. Mike Bailey said that the police can’t do much about nuisance crimes like graffiti unless someone turns in the perpetrator to police or they are caught in the act of vandalism.

Police had no suspects Thursday, Bailey said.