Homeless people and panhandlers are one of the biggest problems for businesses in the downtown area, Main Street merchants told Mayor George Flaggs Jr. Monday.

Flaggs met with the merchants and downtown residents Monday night at Adorn the Glam House, a business on Washington Street. Flaggs said he plans other meetings at downtown businesses in the future, including a crime prevention meeting at a location on South Street at the end of May. The site was not named.

Business owners Monday night asked why the panhandlers and other homeless people wandering the downtown area and sitting on benches in front of their stores couldn’t be arrested.

Flaggs said authorities are prevented by law from arresting panhandlers, citing a federal case in which a New Orleans ordinance prohibiting panhandlers was declared unconstitutional.

“They have a constitutional right to ask, and you have a constitutional right to not give,” he said. He added police and security guards hired by the city try to keep the panhandlers and other vagrants moving and away from the stores, but “you cannot stop folks from sitting on their constitutional rights, (benches) meaning city property.

“If you have a bench in front of your business and you want it moved, call us and we’ll move it,” Flaggs said.

He said, however, if someone is breaking the law by being drunk, disturbing the peace or trespassing, they will be arrested, and urged the merchant to report problems.

“If you see something, call it in,” he said. “Call 911 first, because we need a record of it. A lot of incidents are not being recorded if they’re happening, but Facebook says they’re happening. We go off 911, and he (Police Chief Milton Moore) checks the videos. There are a lot of video cameras around town, people own them and they allow us to look at the videos.”

Flaggs also said people need to stop giving panhandlers or vagrants money and food to prevent them from hanging around a business. “If you give them money or food, they’ll think you like them and they’ll hang around,” he said.

Addressing other security measures, Flaggs said he would investigate a complaint that the security guards hired by the city are riding in their cars and not out on foot, walking the area. The city has hired a security guard company to patrol downtown to allow police to patrol other areas of the city.

He said the police department has also returned a uniformed officer to patrol the area.

He also said he would look into a complaint about the lights in the parking garage. Some merchants who park at the garages said the motion sensor-activated lights do not come on immediately when they enter the covered areas of the garage.

In a related downtown matter, Flaggs said there will not be a farmers’ market pavilion at the corner of Washington and Jackson streets.

The pavilion was included in the city’s capital improvements bond issue, but the project was scrapped after the board received a lone bid of $768,368 from Fordice Construction to build the pavilion that was $128,368 more than the project’s $640,000 budget.

“We don’t need a $700,000 farmers’ market pavilion downtown,” he said, adding he was looking at other options for a covered area for the market.