According to the Downtown Reno Partnership Business Improvement District, they “contract with Streetplus, a company with 25 years experience improving cities through hard work, to hire, train and manage” the Segway riding, uniformed team of ambassadors. The website goes on to say, “they work with Reno Police, Reno Fire, REMSA and City of Reno code enforcement to maintain the district.”
After sending a series of questions to Streetplus, including whether the ambassadors had proper training, we received an email from Steve Hillard, listed as President and Principal, with an address out of Exton, PA.
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” he wrote back earlier this month. “Streetplus is committed to providing well-trained and professional personnel to perform ambassador duties for the Downtown Reno Partnership and we’ve provided these services since November 2018. The Ambassadors receive initial and ongoing training structured around their job duties and the various situations they are required to deal with, to include protests. After a thorough review of the situation, the person involved is no longer employed by Streetplus.”
We were still left wondering who this employee was, how long he had been with the ambassadors and whether there had been initial warnings to Reno team could have been better in tune with. We were also wondering about the ambassador’s own self regulation. Initially, we received a text message from another member of the Reno ambassadors saying since the shirtless man was not in uniform the pictures we posted were of no concern.
Here’s what one of our readers who lives in a tent communicated with us, before the protest altercation: “This "ambassador" Chris, was down at the tracks, where I live in my tent, a few nights ago. It was around 10pm and I was pretty much the only one about. He came up drinking a beer, it didn't seem to be his first one either. He stood in clear area close enough for me to hear everything he was saying. When he first arrived, he was held up from a train stopped on the tracks, a common thing for them. When he was able to cross the tracks he started complaining about all the people living in tents and how there is no place that he could go and enjoy a little privacy any more. Then he started calling everyone that was living out there faggots and leaches. I sat there quietly not saying anything. He knew that I was keeping an eye on him, as were several others from their tents. He started going off about people shouldn't be watching him and that it was his job to everyone else. It was pretty clear that he was looking for a fight. After about 20 minutes of getting no reaction, he must have gotten tired of listening to himself rant and rave, so he left….. You could tell that he felt superior than everyone around there.” We could not independently confirm this account, but it left us concerned as well as to mechanisms to prevent such worrisome behavior from ambassadors.