By Cheryl Jahn

Downtown clean-up stepped up

Jul 22, 2022 | 3:10 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – Events like Summerfest happen every weekend in the downtown. But making it a safe place for everyone to enjoy takes a lot of work by a lot of people, as was noted by Downtown Prince George in a recent presentation to Council.

“We work with the Prince George Brain-Injured Group for our litter-clean-up program. We’re also working with DART and they’re helping clean up the alleys every morning, seven days a week and we’re working with Prince George Activators, PG Groundworks, to help us with graffiti removal or gafitti-cover-up, whatever makes sense in those certain instances.”

But during that presentation to Council, which partially funds Downtown Prince George, some cracks are appearing. The Brain-injured group has also upped its game, out five mornings a week, instead of three. ACME, the company that cleans up biohazards, has seen an uptick in the clean up its efforts.

“When COVID hit, there weren’t as many people downtown, the businesses weren’t downtown, they weren’t able to clean up for themselves and we noticed an increase in our back alleys of biohazards. Biohazards are unpleasant things that we don’t always like to talk about. And we want to make sure they’re cleaned up properly.”

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Colleen Van Mook says Downtown Prince George has a number of grants available for businesses, like the Re-imagine grant, which saw a surge in 2020 as businesses tried to make themselves COVID-friendly. A new one, unfortunately, was created in 2021, called the broken windows grant.

“We saw how difficult that was for businesses and, especially, it was happening during COVID, so they’re already facing some economic challenges. So we thought, if we can ease the pain a little bit, we created the broken windows grant. We got the idea from our partner in Downtown Victoria and we were able to give [businesses] a small amount of money to go toward the cost of replacing broken windows.”

In the meantime, it was noted both the City of Prince George and Downtown Prince George are two of more than twenty organizations working towards evaluating whether efforts to make the downtown safe, clean, and inclusive are working.

by Cheryl Jahn

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Downtown clean-up stepped up

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