Myrtle Beach taxpayers fund staff to work on Ocean Blvd. Here’s what they do
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Downtown Myrtle Beach on a Friday night
Steady foot traffic along Ocean Boulevard in the early evening hours on Friday before the thunderstorm was met by men in yellow polo shirts.
Those men are Gold Cap Ambassadors, a taxpayer funded program by the Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance, and they were doing their job to keep the main drag of Ocean Boulevard between 9th and 16th Avenues clean.
Carrying plastic buckets and armed with trash pickers, the ambassadors made their way up and down Ocean Boulevard picking up food wrappers, napkins and cigarette butts.
A golf cart in the same color yellow as the polo shirts was parked right in front of the SkyWheel, and was utilized to drive the filled trash buckets away.
While the ambassadors were walking around Ocean Boulevard early on Friday evening, there was no visible Myrtle Beach Police Department presence, including officers, cars or golf carts. Just before 6 p.m. an unmarked black Dodge with a uniform officer drove southbound along Ocean Boulevard.
Two of the four out on Friday wore “ambassador-in-training” shirts. They both declined to comment when asked about their new jobs. A third gold cap ambassador also declined to comment when approached by The Sun News.
John Pellish, was picking up garbage just before 6 p.m. across the street from the Gay Dolphin Gift Cove.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Pellish said he’s been an ambassador since this past February and has lived in Myrtle Beach for the past three years.
“I like it down here and I like to see the city clean,” he said when asked why he wanted to become an ambassador.
During a typical shift, Pellish said he picks a zone downtown and takes a plastic gallon bucket and a trash picker and cleans up leftover litter.
“We talk to everybody, help the homeless if they want it and watch out for everybody,” he said about the community interaction part of his job.
If there’s an emergency downtown, Pellish said he and all the other ambassadors have a radio that they can call back to their headquarters. From there, he said, someone at the main offices on the other end of the radio will call the police.
Concerns about safety along Ocean Boulevard have escalated after the busy summer season started with multiple shootings and violent crime events.
In the wake of the events, questions arose about how safe downtown Myrtle Beach really is and what safety measures are taxpayer funded.
In addition to paying for Myrtle Beach Police Department officers to patrol downtown and implement a flushing traffic pattern to make way for emergency vehicles, taxpayers are also funding the Ambassadors program through the Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance.
The program was started five years ago in 2020 with the goals of improving the cleanliness and safety perceptions of downtown Myrtle Beach.
“Their duties do not replace any city services or supplement police, rather work as an extra set of eyes and ears for our multiple levels of enforcement including the police but also code enforcement and public works,” a job description of the gold cap ambassadors reads on a city-run website.
At a Myrtle Beach Downtown Alliance board meeting earlier this month on May 15, board members approved their budget for the next fiscal year, pending the approval of the City of Myrtle Beach’s final budget by the city council. According to a slide at the meeting, the ambassadors walk approximately eight miles a day during their shift.
On Friday and Saturday night, the MBDA has five ambassadors on shift from 1:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Many of the violent crimes committed downtown this summer have occurred after 10 p.m., according to previous reporting.
A large chunk of the MBDA’s budget is devoted to increasing the number of gold cap ambassadors downtown by four for the 2026 fiscal year.
In April, the MBDA spent $54,473.62 on the ambassador program. In 2025 through the end of April, the MBDA spent $534,101.09 on the ambassadors, making it the organization’s second largest expense of the year behind management and overhead.
The program will be increasing its cost by 34%, a slide at the MBDA budget meeting showed. That will increase the cost to almost a million dollars, or $877,564.99, with the addition of four extra ambassadors to help serve the south end of downtown.
In total, the MBDA’s fiscal year budget for 2026 is $2,386,128.84, meeting documents stated.
MBDA spokesperson Michelle Cantey said after the meeting that the expansion plans were already in place before the fatal North Ocean Boulevard shooting on April 26. She added that gold cap ambassadors are not a replacement for law enforcement downtown, but are meant to answer questions and be a friendly presence.
This story was originally published June 1, 2025 at 6:30 AM.
