By Eric Curl
Feb. 26, 2023 – The city is preparing to extend a program that employs homeless individuals to clean up litter downtown.
The litter abatement program is set to expire this year after the city first awarded a contract to Union Mission in late 2019 to oversee the initiative and subsequently renewed the annual contract, most recently in February 2022. A request for proosals issued in late January could extend the program for up to five years.
At a cost of $140,400 a year, the city has been funding the program with revenue raised by an occupied room fee charged to hotels within the Convention District, an area bounded by the Savannah River to the north, East Broad Street to the east, Park Avenue to the south, and Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard to the west. The city is asking for a crew of six workers and one supervisor to provide the litter collection services, which typically consist of four hours of work in the afternoons, three days a week, although the schedule is sometimes increased depending on need.
Union Mission has been paying program participants $12 an hour, which was above the city’s “living wage” pay rate requirement of $11.82 at the time. The new pay rate must be at least $15.77 to account for the increased living wage.
City officials say the program has been a success, with teams of seven typically filling 50 large brown paper bags of litter weekly throughout about 290 blocks.
The city initiated the program after Union Mission brought former Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry to Savannah to talk about a similar initiative he had launched in his city. The nonprofit intends to submit a proposal to continue overseeing the program that CEO and President Michael Traynor said has had more than 70 participants collect about 7,600 bags of trash since it began. While the program alone isn’t set up as a solution to homelessness, it is a vital component to helping participants get back on their feet by providing a steady income and soft skills training, Traynor said.
“You have to be able to think about the holistic part of the individual,” he said.
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