BANGOR, Maine — Keeping Maine's cities clean and safe is a top priority for residents and visitors alike. The City of Bangor is considering hiring a third-party company to clean and monitor the downtown area to do just that.
The nonprofit Downtown Bangor Partnership proposed an idea to city leaders in collaboration with a New York-based company, Streetplus, to hire the third-party service to meet the downtown's needs.
"There's some long ongoing issues that just have been plaguing downtown," Betsy Lundy, the nonprofit's executive director, said.
Streetplus works in more than 90 communities across 14 states, which has ambassadors doing maintenance and janitorial work, social service outreach, and landscaping among other things to help maintain focus areas within a city, according to its president, Steve Hillard.
"We're able to concentrate on those eye sores and environmental conditions multiple times during an 8-hour shift," Hillard said.
Hillard estimates Streetplus would need to hire about eight ambassadors to maintain Bangor's downtown if the city approves the proposal. The proposed contract would cost the city about $1.2 million for three years.
Hillard said the ambassadors would work in collaboration with other city entities, like the police and public works departments.
"They [ambassadors] would start every day just walking through downtown identifying the issues that exist and solving them before anybody ever arrives," Lundy said. "It kind of presents a clean slate for people when they arrive to downtown so they're not walking into situations they weren't planning for."
Hillard and Lundy presented the proposal to city councilors on June 12. Some councilors see the benefits of rolling out a ready-made program, while others think some up-and-coming city programs could do the same work.
"The real question is, do we want to invest in an organization that can relieve a lot of stress off of a lot of our departments so that we can actually focus on things that we are potentially not focusing on because of these overworked burdens from public works, police department, fire department, you name it?" Councilor Joseph Leonard said during the city council workshop. "Or do we want to go the longer route and build a department to focus on these issues that potentially can take years to build and incorporate?"
Bangor's Development Director, Anne Krieg, said the city will look into how the company interacts with different departments to make sure it would be an efficient way to provide services.
