By Hayley Conole
New Business Improvement Area chairman Elie Gharib will take over the role in the Somerset Village BIA on Dec. 1 with his main focus on improving the safety of the area, especially at night.
“We have the goal of trying to make this area cleaner,” he says. “No bums, no drug dealers and (we want to) make it more viable, similar to Elgin Street, where people can come down and enjoy their walk without being bugged by beggars or rough people.”
Gharib replaces former Duke of Somerset owner Edgar Mitchell as the BIA chair following the closure of the pub last month.
He was elected chair by the committee of five other local business owners who make up the Somerset Village BIA board.
As the owner of Gabriel Pizza, Gharib knows the area well and is already taking steps to increase security for businesses and residents alike.
“I have been at this location for almost five years,” he says. “We took this location when Bank Street was scary and the whole building was empty.”
Gharib has already secured his building’s three-level parking garage, which he says served as a hiding place for drug dealers.
“We enclosed the whole building with an iron fence and put an automatic lock on the door so nobody can go in the basement anymore,” he says.
Gharib is already hard at work with plans to improve the safety of the area.
“Our aim is to add more lighting at night,” he says. “I have talked to the merchants to see what they would like. We have a budget that we can spend on advertising the street or helping to landscape and I have also talked to the residents to see what they’d like to see happen.”
One particular problem that Gharib identified was the location of a Wine Rack store inside Hartman’s on the corner of Bank and Somerset.
“We are trying to talk to Hartman’s not to sell cheap wine bottles, because people then carry them and start drinking them in the street.”
Renata Stolberg works at the Wine Rack and says she knows the kind of “rough element” Gharib describes.
She says that while she doesn’t believe these customers are dangerous, she does feel uneasy leaving work at night.
“There are times when the people I serve are still outside when I finish work and they will sometimes recognize me, which makes me nervous,” she says.
Stephanie Fleming works at Second Cup, across from Hartman’s, and says the atmosphere at night can be frightening.
“On the weekend, there is definitely more of a drunken crowd, but most nights there are homeless men that hang out in front of the store,” she says.
“There are times we will call the police if we feel threatened, especially since there are mostly women working here,”Fleming adds.
Victoria Burns is a resident of The Strand apartment block on Somerset and she says while she sometimes doesn’t feel safe at night, there isn’t really a lot that can be done.
“There’s not much that you can do except help the people that have problems,” she says.