State officials will begin moving homeless people in downtown to the new France Road homeless shelter starting at 5 a.m. Wednesday morning. That's when the shelter, which officials describe as a transitional facility, will open.
Officials say going to the shelter is optional for those homeless people, but they also say the homeless can't stay near the Superdome or the French Quarter.
"That is an ingress/egress area that has been deemed an area we must secure," Colonel Jacques Thibodeaux, director of the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said to WWL's Tommy Tucker, referring to the heightened federal security designation given to the Super Bowl and Mardi Gras following the January 1 Bourbon Street terror attack.
According to Thibodeaux, those who don't want to go to the shelter have another option, a bus or a train ticket out of town.
"If they have a family member where they can get back on their feet, that's one of the things we definitely want to offer to them," Thibodeaux said. "If they choose to have a bus ticket to go to a different climate or a location, for example, that will be afforded to them. They will be given the opportunity to go to the transition center, or they will have to move from the location where they are."
Thibodeaux adds that the state has requested a presidential declaration by which federal authorities will absorb the cost of the shelter and of the bus and train tickets for the homeless who want to leave New Orleans.
"Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, and that's what this will do for this portion of the time," Thibodeaux said. "We won't leave anybody behind. We want to make sure that everyone is safe for these two events and that the homeless people will have a safe place to be for this event."
Thibodeaux says this could be the start of a full-time effort to keep the homeless off the street.
"We just hope that it does spark a larger conversation about how we can address it as a city, a parish, and as a nation," Thibodeaux said.
