When the city kicked off the Downtown Denton Ambassador Program in January, many employees at More Fun Comics & Games were skeptical because they thought city leaders could be using the nearly $1.5 million in a smarter way, an employee told the Denton Record-Chronicle.
“When you see the giant check they wrote the actual company and the actual wages of the ambassadors, it was a little frustrating,” the employee, who asked to remain unidentified, said Wednesday afternoon.
About nine months later, the employee said the ambassadors, who work as a hospitality and safety team, have been effective picking up litter but isn’t sure how helpful they’ve been to tourists, though he said they do feel welcomed by the ambassadors, who “seem to be pretty harmless.”
“Unhoused people are still disturbing the peace,” the employee said. “It’s still happening.”
Last week, city staff released a progress report for the Downtown Ambassadors Program covering its first full five months, from February through June, revealing a drop in referrals for people experiencing homelessness, an increased need for power washing and a lot of trash being picked up — more than 11,000 pounds.
It shows a need for downtown visitors to embrace the message of “Don’t Mess with Texas,” the Texas Department of Transportation’s anti-litter campaign.
Although the five-month progress report showed a drop in homelessness referrals — from 35 in February to seven in May and June — it doesn’t mean that people experiencing homelessness have disappeared from the downtown area, or that some of those referrals aren’t for the same person, said Courtney Douangdara, the city’s deputy director of community services.
So far in October, Douangdara said, there have been 96 referrals, as of Oct. 29.
That number exceeds the 88 referrals given in February through June, according to the recent progress report.
“We do not track the number of people experiencing homelessness downtown and are unable to say if the unsheltered population has decreased in the area,” Douangdara said in a follow-up email Wednesday.
“Ambassadors regularly make connections and build rapport with the unsheltered population downtown. Staff referred to the decline in homeless service referrals in recent meetings with Block by Block leadership and during the month of October, so far, referrals have increased significantly.”
It’s unclear how many of those referrals lead to people seeking help at the Denton Community Shelter on Loop 288 or at other nonprofits since Douangdara said those numbers aren’t also being tracked.
In the progress report, staff said the ambassadors greeted more than 43,000 visitors over the five-month period.
They also received favorable ratings from survey respondents, with 77% of local businesses saying they were satisfied with the hours of operation — 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily — and 65% of visitors who were satisfied with their overall safety walking to and from their vehicles at night, Dustin Sternbeck, the chief city spokesperson, said in an email Wednesday.
The favorable ratings come from a quarterly survey that staff began conducting in August with local businesses and visitors.
“They do great when they stop by and say hi, introduce themselves and ask if there’s anything we may need,” one business owner said of the ambassadors, in a quote in the progress report. “We have had the opportunity to engage with them on multiple occasions, and they always approach us in a friendly and polite way.”
However, Sternbeck said those numbers aren’t a true representation of how the business community feels because only a handful have responded to the surveys.
“There were very few responses in the last quarter,” he said, adding that they plan to do “a big push” soon to increase the engagement.
Patchouli Joe’s Books & Indulgences was one of the downtown businesses that responded to the survey, said Charlie Forester, a manager at the bookstore.
Forester said the ambassadors have been helpful picking up trash outside and behind the business. They communicate well if Patchouli Joe’s has an issue, coming in to check in with Forester and being responsive to business owners.
“They are a benefit to the downtown Square,” Forester said.
The Downtown Denton Ambassadors Program kicked off in late January as a two-year pilot program funded at nearly $1.5 million to offer cleaning and hospitality services and community assistance and engagement with people experiencing homelessness. It’s managed by Block by Block, a Louisville, Kentucky-based company that operates similar programs in downtowns around the country.
“It’s really a great addition to our city and a great presentation of our city,” Mayor Gerard Hudspeth told a small crowd of business and city leaders and reporters at a kickoff event in January. “I’m really excited about this.”
In March, city staff released a breakdown of how the new pilot program had been unfolding. By March, Downtown Ambassadors had:
- Removed 462 stickers and 128 graffiti tags.
- Picked up 2,681 pounds of trash.
- Conducted five safety escorts.
- Cleaned up 15 feces piles and 20 areas with urine or vomit.
- Observed 79 people who were experiencing homelessness.
- Referred 29 people for homeless services.
But the breakdown didn’t list a data point for aggressive panhandling, as Block by Block does for its program in downtown Fort Worth.
In March 2023, Matt Beard, the director of public improvement districts for Fort Worth, said the ambassadors there carry devices to log stats and make maintenance requests.
Beard said aggressive panhandling incidents in Fort Worth decreased 32% from 2021 to 2022.
“We track aggressive panhandling closely and actively discourage it through a variety of techniques,” Beard said in an email.
Douangdara said Wednesday that the downtown Denton program has seen 10 instances of aggressive panhandling since late January, but that information wasn’t available in the reports shared with the Record-Chronicle.
“We provided the City’s ordinance on aggressive solicitation to Block by Block when they were setting up programming in Denton, so they were aware of local regulations,” Douangdara wrote in an email. “The output is there to track if/when they have to call the police specifically for that purpose.”
The October progress report didn’t delve into the particulars of cleaning up bodily waste from the downtown area but instead offered a more holistic breakdown, giving only two graphs for hospitality output and graffiti removal.
The stats given for hospitality output included:
- Hospitality assistance, which includes offering directions or information, motorist assistance, safety and umbrella escorts and other services: 137 in February, 234 in March, 124 in April, 84 in May and 134 in June.
- Business contacts: 189 in February, 169 in March, 134 in April, 95 in May and 131 in June.
- Homeless service referrals: 35 in February, 23 in March, 16 in April, 7 in May and 7 in June.
Graffiti removal offered two category breakdowns:
- Written/painted graffiti: 180 in February, 167 in March, 31 in April, 39 in May and 109 in June.
- Bills and stickers: 524 in February, 355 in March, 231 in April, 145 in May and 97 in June.
On Wednesday morning, Douangdara shared a more detailed breakdown of what the ambassadors did between February and September. Those details include:
- Litter (individual pieces collected): 111,966 total
- Biohazard (feces): 190
- Hazardous cleanup (urine): 79
- Hazardous cleanup (vomit): 94
- Motorist assistance: 79
- Safety escort: 38
- Homeless referrals for service: 124
“We’d love people to know the Downtown Ambassadors are available to assist with a variety of things like umbrella escorts in the rain, to and from parking lots during hours of operation, and even to assist with flat tires or dead car batteries,” Douangdara wrote in her email.
“They are here to serve the community, and downtown visitors can call or text the hotline for assistance: 940-354-5767.”