by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The mayor and Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver will meet to discuss how to handle the City’s homeless during the Super Bowl, but team and City officials say the approach will be largely business as usual.
Weaver wrote Mayor John Peyton this week to confirm an Aug. 26, meeting that would bring the pair together with local homeless advocates. The mayor has postponed the meeting, but is planning to meet with Weaver to discuss what the Jaguars owner called temporary “solutions to this problem.”
“We are faced with the problem of how to house and care for the existing homeless persons and families as well as the influx of additional ‘homeless types’ during the approximate two-week period, surrounding Super Bowl XXXIX,” Weaver’s letter said.
A team spokesperson deferred comment on those solutions to the mayor’s office. Peyton spokesperson Heather Murphy said the City wasn’t planning any departure from its routine handling of Duval County’s estimated 17,500 homeless. Beyond making shelters and other services available, Murphy said the City didn’t have anything Super Bowl specific planned.
Super Bowl Host Committee spokesperson Heather Surface said the committee’s plans for the homeless were standard. Host committee president Michael Kelly also ran Tampa’s host committee when that city hosted the game in 2001. Surface said Kelly “didn’t do anything in particular with the homeless in Tampa.
“They didn’t ‘sweep the streets’ as is often rumored,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Weaver told Peyton the City should prepare for additional “homeless types,” lured downtown by the game. But the City of Houston — host of the most recent Super Bowl — found their homeless were actually less conspicuous once the crowds arrived.
The homeless aren’t much of a presence in Houston’s central business district, said Jordy Tollett, president of the Greater Houston Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. Tollett said most of the area’s homeless receded from the Super Bowl spotlight.
“People are proud. The truth of the matter is they don’t enjoy crowds,” said Tollett.
Tollett said there was some support in Houston for trying to obscure the homeless. But he said City planners decided against extra measures to get the homeless off the streets.
“They’re part of every city’s fabric, and they’re part of our fabric. We just thought it would be wrong,” he said.
People often lump the homeless and panhandlers together, said Tollett, but Houston prepared for them separately.
“The homeless really avoid crowds, they become almost non-existent, but panhandlers are going to be where the crowds are,” said Tollett.
Houston relied on an existing ordinance to discourage panhandling. Tollett said the City forbids people seeking money from coming within eight feet of others. However, he said Houston enforced the law with some leniency given that the Super Bowl attracts around 100,000 visitors, many of them looking to buy or sell food, drinks or souvenirs.
“We’re talking 100,000 people here,” said Tollett. “Whether people are asking for money or trying to sell something, we understood exceptions were going to have to be made.”