A Bangor organization will again ask the city, after being previously denied, to hire a company to clean and patrol downtown to keep people safe.
Downtown Bangor Partnership will ask the city to approve $320,000 to launch a three-year contract with Streetplus, a Brooklyn-based urban safety, cleaning and hospitality service. If approved, the company would hire and train six local people to perform a range of cleaning and safety tasks 24 hours a day, said Betsy Lundy, Downtown Bangor Partnership’s director.
In addition to keeping downtown clean, Lundy said the Streetplus workers would aim to reduce misbehavior and address increased safety concerns she has heard from local business owners and employees. The program would also meet people downtown who are homeless and struggling with substance and mental health disorders and direct them to local resources who can help them.
If approved, Lundy said she believes Streetplus would work in tandem with similar groups and services that the city and other nonprofits launched in recent years rather than duplicating or replacing them.
Since Lundy first contacted Streetplus in summer 2020, Bangor founded a seasonal ranger program to patrol the city’s parks and the Bangor Community Action Team, which is overseen by the Bangor Police Department and responds to non-emergency matters such as welfare checks and vagrancy calls. Also since then, the Health Equity Alliance opened a new community center and outreach team specifically for people who are homeless.
Though Lundy said she feels Bangor “has come a long way in terms of increasing services downtown,” she feels the city’s safety and cleanliness needs have risen beyond what “understaffed” city departments can address in-house.
“These are newer problems for Bangor, but they’re not new problems in general,” Lundy said. “Part of this is Bangor coming to terms with what it means to be an urban environment.”
Founded in 1991, Streetplus is in nearly 90 communities in 12 states, according to Steve Hillard, Streetplus president. The company hires and trains local people — called “ambassadors” — to perform whatever tasks a community needs.
Employees receive 24 to 56 hours of training on how to de-escalate situations and work with people who may have untreated mental health disorders, Hillard said.
A list of 14 responsibilities, which Lundy provided, that Bangor’s Streetplus workers would be tasked with include “make contact and converse with pedestrians,” and “approach panhandlers and advise of local ordinances.”
In addition to picking up trash and cleaning sidewalks, the Streetplus workers could also walk people to their cars at night if they feel unsafe, and speak with anyone “displaying a behavior that goes against city ordinances,” Lundy said.
“Most of the time when you ask someone to stop a behavior, they’ll stop,” Lundy said.
Streetplus’ safety workers aren’t armed and have no power to arrest or ticket anyone, but they can call police if a situation escalates, Lundy said.
The first year of the three-year contract would cost $400,000. The city would be responsible for paying $320,000 and Downtown Bangor Partnership would chip in $80,000, Lundy said. The funding is written into the city’s proposed municipal budget that councilors are now reviewing.
Over three years, the service would cost at least $1.2 million, which would pay for Streeplus’ employees and equipment they need to patrol and clean downtown. That equipment ranges from mountain bikes and a truck to power washers and walkie-talkies, Lundy said.
Lundy previously requested $1.2 million of the city’s more than $20 million in federal pandemic recovery funding to contract with Streetplus, but was denied in 2023.
A United Way panel that reviewed and scored each application for pandemic funding and made recommendations to the city ranked the request second to last and said the measure seems like “a punitive, unsustainable and stigmatizing approach to addressing the issues facing the city.”
Lundy again pitched contracting with Streetplus to the City Council last year, but councilors ultimately turned it down, as they felt the program wasn’t needed because of existing and upcoming services.
In a March 3 meeting of the Bangor City Council’s Business and Economic Development Committee, Lundy said she will again request the funding to partner with Streetplus.
Some councilors warmed to the idea, such as Dan Tremble, who said downtowns are representative of the city as a whole and “we have a ways to go to make downtown what we want it to be.”
Councilor Gretchen Schaefer, however, said she previously voted against Streetplus because she’s skeptical about the company’s ability to hire local people to perform a wide range of services.
Shaefer said last month she had voted down contracting with Streetplus because “it never made sense to me how we find these uniformed workers who could solve all of Bangor’s ills for $16 or $17 an hour.”
Evanston, Illinois, which sits roughly 12 miles north of Chicago and has about 75,000 residents, suspended its cleaning and maintenance contract with the company in February 2023 after security footage surfaced of Streetplus janitorial employees appearing to physically assault a man after they allegedly witnessed him urinating on a utility box.
Hillard claimed the altercation arose because the man ran at the Streetplus team with a box cutter. He said the city ultimately found no wrongdoing on Streetplus’ part, but declined to comment further citing “potential litigation.”
Streetplus fired three workers involved in the incident and required all employees to undergo additional training on how to interact with people who are homeless, the Evanston RoundTable reported.
Evanston lifted its Streetplus suspension in March 2023, but later decided not to renew its contract with the company for 2024.
Lundy said she’s aware of the situation that happened in Evanston, but it didn’t give her pause because, “I don’t think you can operate in this sphere without ever having a mistake.”
