Morgan M. Hurley | Downtown Editor

Keeping everyone clean and safe through Comic Con

Comic con is right around the corner and the Clean & Safe Program, the property and business improvement district (PBID) for the Downtown San Diego Partnership, is already preparing for five of the busiest days of the year.

As the PBID, the Clean & Safe team does exactly what their name says — they keep the Downtown region clean and safe for the property and business owners within their assessment district. Cortez Hill, Civic Columbia, Marina, Gaslamp Quarter and East Village are all included in the 272 blocks made up of 10,606 parcels.

With more than 130,000 people expected to attend the 2014 Comic Con event, Clean & Safe’s staff, especially their Maintenance and Safety Ambassadors, will be working overtime. Those visitors are in addition to the normal flock of visitors to the Gaslamp region on weekends.

“We know that Comic-Con puts San Diego on the world stage, and every year we put together a plan that ensures Downtown is at its very best,” said Bahija Hamraz, executive director of Clean & Safe. “Even amid all the costumes and craziness, our team works tirelessly to ensure that Downtown remains clean, safe and open for business.”

From the five-day period of Wednesday through Sunday, July 23 through July 27, Clean & Safe will have 18 people on the ground from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. in what the organization considers the “core grids” impacted by the annual event: 14th Street to Union Street (east to west), and Broadway to L Street (north to south). These employees do not count the others who will be busy in the outer neighborhoods doing maintaining the normal operations and duties of the PBID.

The Safety Ambassadors are the security arm of Clean & Safe and they act as an extension to the San Diego Police Department. On any given day on the streets of Downtown, the Safety Ambassadors are the first responders, the “eyes and ears” if you will, and if they can’t handle the situation, only then is SDPD called in.

During Comic Con, however, the safety ambassadors step up their game and are even more hyper vigilant, according to Alonso Vivas, Clean & Safe’s assistant director of operations.

In addition to a constant flow of requests for directions, wayward sticker removals, identifying illegal vendors, and traffic control, their continuous safety patrols throughout the Gaslamp Quarter and in and around the event areas has helped keep incidents to a minimum during Comic Con year after year.

Their Maintenance Ambassadors dispose of trash, remove graffiti, and perform landscaping and other maintenance-related duties.

During an average week during 2013, Clean & Safe generally removed approximately seven tons of trash; but during Comic Con in 2013, Clean & Safe employees collected 19.64 tons of trash in just three days.

Still weeks away, Clean & Safe team members have already surveyed and secured all trash cans contained in the Gaslamp Quarter, Marina District and East Village to make sure they are all in good working order and can handle the amount of trash and debris expected.

“We want to make sure that everybody visiting Downtown has a good experience so that they will come back, but we also want to make sure that we’re providing the same level of service for all of the residents in Downtown who are obviously paying into the program,” Vivas said.

“We do a good job partnering up with all the agencies within the city, so with SDPD and the Gaslamp Quarter Association, we make sure we’re all in partnership and we’re all synced in and on the same page and that the area is clean and that it is safe,” he said.

One of the biggest things Vivas said they deal with during the convention is people affixing stickers and flyers to surfaces where they don’t belong. Last year they removed more than 18,000 flyers and stickers from sidewalks, walls and other surfaces.

Despite the challenges posed to his team, Vivas said they all look forward to Comic Con and he views the largest convention of the year like others would the playoffs or finals in any sport, because the Clean & Safe team preps for it all year and it is their time to shine.

“To be able to keep up the level of service and the level of cleanness [we do] with that amount of people and that amount of trash, I think it’s amazing,” he said.

“I always tell the crew, ‘most of the time when there’s a tornado, most of the clean up is done after the tornado is gone,’” Vivas said. “’We’re cleaning up the tornado site while the tornado is still going. We’re there for the whole thing.’”

For more information about the Clean & Safe Program, visit downtownsandiego.org/cleansafe.