The City of Moncton has given people living in a tent city on Albert Street an extra day to pack up and leave due to the heavy rainfall.

The city had issued an eviction notice requiring tenters to leave the site on Wednesday. But a spokesperson for the city, Isabelle LeBlanc said that people are now being given an extra day so they do not have to pack up their belonging in the rain.

“This is a difficult transition for a lot of people and we want to be as respectful as we possibly can and given the weather over the past 24 to 30 hours we felt that it was best to extend it by a day,” said LeBlanc.

YMCA Reconnect’s Trevor Goodwin was at the tent city on Wednesday morning checking in on the handful of people still living on the site.  He said most people have already packed up and left.

“A lot of people are accessing the shelter beds and we have a good number that are returning and staying with family within the area,” said Goodwin.

Some displaced tenters are staying at the Harvest House shelter according to the shelter’s executive director Cal Maskery. He said that the shelter was at full capacity Tuesday night even before the two tent cities were officially shut down.

“The big issue for us, we have lots of space but it’s the staffing. We have one staff on at nighttime and you cannot have one staff when you have upstairs and downstairs.”

Maskery says he plans to ask the province and the city for funding to hire extra staff so he can house more people, at least until the new shelter opens and it’s still unclear when exactly that will be.

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