‘People want to party’: Main Street yellow shirt team shifts to late weekend nights
As COVID-19 numbers have continued to ease and crowds have returned to bars and restaurants, Columbia’s downtown advocacy group is now extending the hours its “clean-and-safe” team patrols the Main Street corridor on certain days.
The City Center Partnership, the property owners’ advocacy group for the downtown Main Street District, is now stretching the hours of its yellow shirt squadron of safety and hospitality ambassadors until 1 a.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.
City Center Partnership CEO Matt Kennell said the Main Street area has seen a significant uptick in late night crowds recently, particularly as coronavirus cases have eased and vaccines have become more readily available.
“People want to party,” Kennell told The State on Wednesday, with a laugh. “Now that people are getting vaccinated and masking laws have gotten more lax, we are seeing a tremendous growth in the late night crowds downtown. It used to be that only The Whig was open until really late. But now the 1600 block is really hopping, the Market on Main is really hopping, Cantina 76 is hopping. ... So, after listening to some of our businesses, we extended the Yellow Shirt hours until 1 a.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday.”
The yellow shirt team, so named because employees wear bright yellow shirts, operates seven days a week. It ends its work at 11:30 Sunday through Wednesday nights.
The yellow shirt personnel provide a visible presence on Main Street and perform a number of functions, from keeping the sidewalks clean to helping citizens with information and directions to providing a conduit with public safety agencies when incidents occur. The sight of the yellow-clad workers has become a constant in the last decade-plus as Main Street has been revitalized.
The recent expansion of yellow shirt hours on Thursdays through Saturdays is a far cry from the doldrums of the pandemic, when budget concerns led City Center Partnership to cut out Sunday night shifts for several months, from summer 2020 into December.
City Center Partnership currently employs 11 members on the yellow shirt squad. Two additional positions on the team are vacant and remain frozen amid budget constraints, but Kennell thinks a sunnier fiscal outlook as the city emerges from the pandemic might allow him to fill at least one of those positions soon.
COVID-19 case numbers have continued a downward trend in South Carolina, as have hospitalizations. As of Wednesday, the state Department of Health and Environmental Control reported 319 COVID patients in South Carolina hospital beds, down about 85 percent from a high of more than 2,400 in January. More than 3.2 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in the Palmetto State.
The move to extend the yellow shirt team’s weekend hours comes as the Main Street business improvement district is set to come up for a 10-year renewal with Columbia City Council. City Center Partnership is the managing entity for the business improvement district, where property owners pay a fee to help with business retention, new business recruiting and the clean-and-safe program, among other efforts.
The Main Street business improvement district was created in 2001 and has been extended several times since. The Main Street corridor has changed dramatically in the last two decades, with bars, restaurants, arts venues, hotels and shops now lining the thoroughfare, and the popular Soda City Market bringing thousands of residents downtown every Saturday morning.
The City Council on Tuesday night scheduled a public hearing for June 15 on the extension of the business improvement district arrangement. The Council would have the final vote on the matter.
Third-term Mayor Steve Benjamin told The State he plans to support the renewal.
“The City Center Partnership is unquestionably one of the drivers of Main Street’s incredible renaissance,” Benjamin said. “It would be foolish to change a winning formula.”
