About Clean & Safe
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).
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CBG has been operating the Clean & Safe team downtown for 22 years. Their services include picking up litter, leaves and debris from sidewalks in a 440-block area of downtown, weed eradication, steam cleaning homeless waste spots and removing handbills.
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In 2021, the Clean & Safe team picked up 26,133 bags or 1,045,320 gallons of trash. They also collected 312 cubic yards of leaves and removed 171 handbills.
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The team starts cleaning at 6AM, every day of the week. Sidewalk cleaning machines are used in tandem with manual cleaning. In 2021, CBG provided 24,840 hours of sidewalk cleaning, weeding and cleaning homeless waste hotspots.
Our Goals for Clean & Safe
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.
- The business community and downtown neighborhoods support the program, its effectiveness and responsiveness.
- Residents, businesses, employees and visitors benefit from the service and a cleaner and safer downtown.
- We contract a local, minority-owned and operated company - Community Business Group (CBG), located in Jackson Ward - for the downtown sidewalk cleaning program.
Downtown Beautification Efforts
In addition to downtown sidewalk cleaning, our organization maintains gateway beautification projects for the City, including weeding, watering and installing seasonal plants. The contractor for the beautification projects is Brightview.
Beautification Projects
The beautification projects include nearly 5,000 plants annually:
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155 planters:
- 91 planters in 3rd and 5th Street gateway area
- 36 planters on Broad Street between 8th and 10th Street
- 28 Broad Street planters relocated to Coliseum area
5 medians:
- 2 blocks of Broad Street medians between Foushee to 1st Street
- 3rd Street median
- 12th and Canal median
- 14th and Dock Street median
Hanging flower baskets and more:
- 126 hanging baskets installed along Broad Street from Belvidere to 12th Street in the Arts District and in the Shockoe neighborhood
- 13 planting beds on 400 block of E. Grace Street
- 300+ annuals planted along the Canal Walk and around the Headman Statue on Brown’s Island
Downtown Graffiti Removal
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. 589 graffiti tags were removed and 32 block faces were power washed on Broad Street between Belvidere and 10th Street. Property owners and businesses in the Downtown Service District area can request help removing graffiti by emailing graffitiremoval@venturerichmond.com.
