As temperatures rise, more unhoused people are moving into the Durango area.
The Durango Police Department and La Plata County Sheriff’s Office regularly clean out illegal campsites to stay ahead of the influx.
Sheriff’s Office Lt. Zach Farnam said the surge in illegal camps occurs like clockwork every spring.
The Sheriff’s Office’s main areas of concern for illegal camping – and the associated trash and fire risks – are the Tech Center in west Durango and X-rock in north Durango, where city and county boundaries abut.
Illegal camps appear almost as quickly as law enforcement can remove them.
He said the Tech Center was empty during the winter. When spring arrived, 15 camps appeared in the rugged hills within a week.
Practically overnight – and sometimes literally – a dozen or more camps crop up, with trash strewed across the site, he said.
Farnam estimated law enforcement has cleaned about 80 camps at X-rock and the Tech Center since the start of spring.
The Sheriff’s Office has removed about 60 yards of trash from the sites over five weekly cleanups, he said.
The cleanup has cost the Sheriff’s Office about $7,500 in labor and taken 150 hours of deputies’ time away from regular duties. Including additional expenses such as dumping fees and equipment purchases, the total cost is approximately $12,000 – 24% of the county’s $50,000 annual cleanup budget.
“We’ve changed our approach,” he said. “Because it’s so expensive to pay contractors, we’re doing all of this trash and camp mitigation ourselves now.”
Farnam said ClearView Cleanup, a contractor the Sheriff’s Office has worked with in the past, quoted $70,000 to $80,000 for cleaning the Tech Center alone.
Farnam, two sheriff’s sergeants, a traffic deputy, a Citizens on Patrol volunteer and two jail trustees joined the most recent cleanup on May 21. That does not include DPD police service technicians and park rangers working on the city side of the property line, who also assisted.
Durango Police Chief Brice Current said hauling trash from illegal camps is a daily task for police officers. If officers fall behind on enforcing illegal camping laws, issues can spread throughout the city.
He said working with the unhoused can be challenging, especially for staff members who are empathetic toward their situations. But officers still must stay on top of clearing and cleaning camps.
Officers can be flexible, however.
If someone is close to securing housing, an officer might allow them to remain at their camp for a few extra days while waiting to move. Such gestures of goodwill are unlikely if a camper is leaving trash scattered.
Farnam shared a similar viewpoint.
He said he’s been in law enforcement in La Plata County for 18 years and has encountered hundreds of illegal camps. But this is his first year leading cleanup efforts. Neither he nor sheriff’s deputies have issued any citations for illegal camping, dumping or trespassing.
“Everyone is human and they deserve to be happy and live a good, clean life. I’m not trying to make anyone’s life harder or be mean or rude,” he said, adding that he has “good, honest, human” conversations with campers and is not interested in criminalizing people for simply trying to get by.
But the risks can’t be ignored when trash accumulates, he said.
It increases fire danger; cleanup is expensive, “nasty” and “gross”; and sheriff’s deputies often find needles among the trash. Abandoned tents and sleeping bags are often soiled with urine and feces. The threat of communicable disease is real.
Especially considering people hike and recreate on the same public lands, he added.
The Sheriff’s Office used to store belongings, giving owners a chance to retrieve them before disposal. But nobody reclaimed their things, he said. Now, any items left at a camp after a 72-hour and a 24-hour notice have been issued are discarded.
“It shocks me how many people will take their personal belongings and leave the tent and a sleeping bag and a few other random items,” he said. “I say, ‘(Take your) personal belongings,’ but then they just abandon their stuff and walk away.”
He said he’s an avid outdoorsman who has spent a considerable amount of money on wilderness gear – and has found abandoned gear at camps in the hills that’s nicer than his own. But the Sheriff’s Office lacks the resources to sanitize or repurpose recovered items, so it all ends up in the landfill.
Current said that although the DPD has nowhere near adequate storage capacity for items recovered from camps, it holds onto belongings – as long as they are not soiled or trashed – and some people reclaim them.
The police department is exploring alternative trash management strategies in collaboration with Manna soup kitchen.
He said options under consideration include reusable containers; requiring the return of tents and sleeping bags to Manna after use; and the addition of wash stations, composting and recycling programs.
“Manna is open to that idea and is partnering with DPD constantly and willing to meet and consider ways to reduce trash. This is ongoing,” he said.
He said the top priority is achieving zero homelessness, but systematic support is needed to come close to that goal. The city does more than many other cities to provide transitional housing and seek solutions for the unhoused.
“Not just to stay on top of it, but to resolve it humanely, and that’s why we like to work with community groups,” Current said. “It’s never as black and white as everybody thinks. Involving partners helps resolve complexities.”
cburney@durangoherald.com
