City of Durango and La Plata County officials are once again asking houseless residents to pack up their belongings and leave a county-owned hillside north of Durango so that a contracted cleaning service can remove the accumulated trash.
The city of Durango’s code enforcement department handed out about 30 notices last week to camps near X-rock, a plot of county-owned land just inside Durango city limits.
Code Enforcement Officer Steve Barkley handed out final notices Tuesday morning to the remaining eight camps before ClearView Cleanup arrived Wednesday to remove trash from the site.
With open space, easy access to public transit and relative proximity to resources in town, X-rock has become a popular campsite for unhoused residents after the closure of the far larger Purple Cliffs camp south of town in 2022.
It is also, in a way, an answer to the question that many in Durango’s homeless community asked as law enforcement spread word of Purple Cliff’s closure: “Where am I supposed to go?”
During the months leading up to he camp’s closure, city and county officials tried to agree on a location for a managed camp, but no such consensus could be reached. Purple Cliffs was “untenable, unplanned and potentially dangerous,” La Plata County Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton wrote in 2021. It was ultimately this reasoning the county offered a year later when it pulled the plug.
Around 9:30 Tuesday morning, Barkley gently woke a sleeping person wrapped in a blanket near the trail. Domingo Tagle emerged from the shroud of blankets, and the two greeted each other with familiar warmth.
“When I first met him, me and him didn’t like each other,” Tagle said.
That was over 10 years ago, Barkley said, and the two are friendly now even as Barkley serves Tagle with trespass notices.
Tagle didn’t know where he would go – “out of town” he said, before joking that he could hide up the hill, only to later return and encounter Barkley again in a matter of days.
He was happy to receive the list of resources Barkley handed out along with the notices to vacate the property. But the brass tacks issue Tagle and other residents of the hillsides face was simple: although some long-term housing solutions are available to some people, the question of where Tagle might go tomorrow is not easily answered.
The crackdown at X-rock was prompted by piles of accumulated trash that litter the property and are a health and safety issue, not to mention it attracts bears and other wildlife.
This week’s cleanup efforts, which have a cost cap of $11,000 and will be covered by the county, are considered an ounce of prevention, county spokesman Ted Holteen said.
The cleanup at Purple Cliffs, which occurred after four years of habitation, was the proverbial pound of cure that cost $375,000.
The litter is not the result of laziness or a lack of care, said Richard Dilworth, who does outreach and advocacy work with and for the homeless community. But the state of unmanaged camps can degrade without support because “daily survival is more important,” he said.
The cat-and-mouse game at X-rock is not a sustainable solution, and Dilworth would still like to see a low-barrier managed camp. It would look nothing like Purple Cliffs, he added.
“This problem will absolutely continue, as far as the unhoused situation, until there is a low-barrier, managed camp,” he said. “But it appears that the city wants to do nothing in that direction. So a whole lot of time, money and incarceration is going to play out until we have a managed camp.”
He added that ultimately, more affordable housing units that accept housing vouchers – places like Lumien Apartments or Espero – are the solution.
“The answer to people being homeless is homes!” Dilworth said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
This story has been updated to reflect that La Plata County is paying for the X-rock cleanup, not the Joint Sales Tax fund. Incorrect information was given to the Herald. Also, an earlier quote by Richard Dilworth erred in saying “unmanged” versus “managed” camp. The quote should have read: “This problem will absolutely continue, as far as the unhoused situation, until there is a low-barrier, managed camp.”
