STATE COLLEGE — Nearly three dozen downtown bars, restaurants and bottle shops have agreed to halt alcohol sales to counter an early St. Patrick’s Day celebration created by Penn State students, the most aggressive effort yet to curb drinking for the unofficial State Patty’s Day holiday.

In exchange, each business will receive a $5,000 subsidy to help account for lost revenue. A committee comprised of university and community leaders announced the plan Tuesday and listed 34 businesses that it said supported this Saturday’s “alcohol-free zone.”

Every downtown establishment that sells alcohol will refrain from doing so Saturday, said Damon Sims, university vice president of student affairs and co-chairman of a committee known as “The Partnership: Campus & Community United Against Dangerous Drinking.” The majority of the funds to pay for the subsidies to businesses would come from campus parking fees collected during previous State Patty’s Day weekends, he said.

State Patty’s Day was created in 2007 to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day when it fell on spring break that year. But the holiday no longer falls during the break, and school administrators, student leaders and community residents have grown weary of a weekend that has become synonymous with excessive drinking and property damage.

Other schools have similar unofficial holidays, but Sims said he thought no other university community had gone to the extent of getting establishments to go alcohol-free.

“Everyone in the partnership really wanted this to go away ... This became one of the few things that we thought of that we hadn’t tried,” Sims said in a phone interview. “Perhaps we can find more headway than in the past.