Downtown leader wants more funds for Hiregood
As city administration prepares a Downtown Action Plan, Puneeta McBryan, the executive director of the Edmonton Downtown Business Association, says the Downtown Core Patrol service that her organization contracts to Hiregood, a company that employs people with lived experience with being unhoused, needs more money.
The Downtown Action Plan goes to the city’s Urban Planning Committee on May 13. It includes reviews of the Capital City Downtown Plan, the Downtown Vibrancy Strategy, the Downtown Investment Plan by a group of non-city entities, and more.
McBryan said she hopes it yields funding for the Downtown Core Patrol, a service that responds to safety issues downtown and tries to prevent problems before they happen.
″(The Downtown Core Patrol) was the result of years of conversations with our members and our board and the community about how many challenges we were having,” McBryan told Taproot about the initial nighttime program that launched in November 2022. “We basically decided (that) emergency services are obviously not able to be out and about the way we need eyes and ears out on the streets overnight.”
In 2024, what used to be called the Downtown Night Patrol & Outreach Services responded to 3,221 incidents, of which 1,088 were wellness checks. The other biggest numbers were for garbage (595), property trespassing and disturbance (550), and property vandalism (549). The patrol was initially staffed by one private security guard and one Hiregood team member. The City of Edmonton’s Downtown Vibrancy Fund invested $400,000 to pilot the program from November 2022 to November 2023, while the EDBA spent approximately $100,000 that year on staff and “other expenses,” McBryan said.
″(It) was made very clear to us from the Downtown Vibrancy team that it was not to be ongoing operational funding,” McBryan said. “The pilot did everything we needed it to — to prove that there was value in us providing this service. We did learn a lot along the way. We didn’t see a lot of value in the security guard component of it.”
The EDBA got half of the $400,000 for its second year from the Downtown Vibrancy Fund. Roughly $80,000 of that went to a daytime patrol pilot that lasted from late October 2024 through January 2025. Those funds ran out at the end of 2024, so the EDBA now funds the core patrol out of its operating budget. The patrol is now made up of two units per night, from midnight to 8am, which comprise two Hiregood staff each.
“It really feels like the city should be paying for part of that,” McBryan said, adding that the city has denied two applications by the business association to the Community Safety and Well-being Grant Program.
Hiregood is also no longer the subcontractor for Bee-Clean Building Maintenance, which hired a different subcontractor to run the washroom attendant program in 2024, the City of Edmonton told Taproot in an email.
Hiregood CEO Jodi Phelan said that boiled down to a salary dispute. “We were getting paid only $23.50 per person to do the work,” Phelan told Taproot. “We have a lot of staff, and we were starting to lose money, so we couldn’t maintain it. We’re not a profit-driven business, but we have to be able to sustain what we do to keep doing what we do.”
