Through the Clean & Safe partnership, the city outsources downtown sidewalk cleaning services to Venture Richmond, who in turn contracts with Community Business Group, LTD (CBG). CBG has been operating the Clean & Safe team downtown for 23 years. Their services include picking up litter, leaves and debris from sidewalks, weed eradication, steam cleaning homeless waste spots and removing handbills in Richmond’s General Service District, comprised of about 440 square blocks on the north side of the river and roughly 82 square blocks on the south side of the river.
The goal of this Venture Richmond program is to keep downtown Richmond clean and safe. The program is responsive to the needs of the areas, businesses and daily situations.
In 2022, the Clean & Safe team picked up 14,868 bags or 1M+ gallons of trash. They also collected 560 cubic yards of leaves and removed 73 handbills.
​
The team starts cleaning at 6AM, every day of the week. Sidewalk cleaning machines are used in tandem with manual cleaning. In 2022, CBG provided 23,500 hours of sidewalk cleaning, weeding and cleaning homeless waste hotspots.
In addition to downtown sidewalk cleaning, Venture Richmond maintains gateway beautification projects for the City, including weeding, watering and installing seasonal plants. The contractor for the beautification projects is Brightview. Find more information about our beautification efforts here!
Our beautification projects include nearly 5,000 plants annually:
​
155 planters:
5 medians:
Hanging flower baskets and more:
Venture Richmond has also boosted its efforts to keep Downtown clean. Following damages that occurred to businesses during protests in 2020, Venture Richmond and CBG launched a new Graffiti Cleaning Pilot Program as part of Clean & Safe. In 2022, 224 graffiti tags were removed from street signs, light poles, buildings and alleyways.
​
Property owners and businesses in the Downtown Service District area can request help removing graffiti by emailing graffitiremoval@venturerichmond.com.
Venture Richmond is committed to a beautiful Richmond, VA by engaging businesses and community leaders to enhance the vitality of Downtown. We work with local companies on street cleaning, graffiti, beautification and placemaking with the intention of making Downtown Richmond a more clean and safe place to be.