Leaving more than a trace

Last Saturday morning (Sept. 20), Mark Young and John Athey were visibly frustrated as they dragged a reclining chair and dozens of garbage bags’ worth of trash from the underbrush along Lindo Channel and loaded it onto a trailer.

Young lives in the neighborhood. He’d gotten a head start on Butte Environmental Council’s annual Bidwell Park & Chico Creeks Cleanup by bagging up trash a few days before, only to discover someone had pulled it all back into the creek bed on Friday night.

“It’s kind of hard to feel bad for the homeless when you see this,” Athey said, gesturing to the trail of refuse leading into the channel. “This is just disgusting.”

Every year at the end of summer, the community removes litter from Chico’s waterways before the rains come and wash it downstream. From an environmental perspective, that effort has never been more important—because the creeks have never been so trashed.

About 450 volunteers for BEC’s cleanup pulled an estimated 40,000 pounds, or 20 tons, of waste from the creeks—compared to 16,900 pounds last year and 5,164 pounds in 2012, said Robyn DiFalco, BEC’s executive director. The environmental organization has been recording the trash totals since 1987; the previous record was set in 2002, when 23,000 pounds of garbage were removed from Chico’s waterways.

“The numbers are shocking, but if you’ve seen what’s been going on in our creeks, it’s not shocking at all,” DiFalco said by phone. “What we collected, some of it was incidental waste, people mindlessly throwing away a bottle or cigarette butt. A lot of it, though, is because people are living on our greenways. They don’t have anywhere else to go.”

It was clear to those who were involved with the cleanup, and likely anyone who’s recently taken a creek-side stroll, that the main source of the garbage is homeless encampments.

On the Wednesday before the cleanup (Sept. 17), park rangers and police officers traversed Chico’s waterways to issue what were essentially eviction notices. Homeless people were given 72 hours to gather their belongings and move along, so volunteers would be unhindered during the cleanup.

Notices were served to people in about 20 camps that day on Comanche Creek alone, said ranger Lisa Barge, and in camps “under nearly every bridge on Little Chico Creek.” All told, more than 50 illegal camping notices were posted prior to the cleanup.

The camps themselves can be foul, rangers say. It’s common to find materials used for making methamphetamine, and other items such as broken glass, buckets of paint, rotten meat, human feces, syringes and clothing detergent in or near waterways. The implications for local aquatic ecosystems and those downstream are serious. And that’s without mentioning the degradation due to illegal campers clearing vegetation, cutting down trees for shelter and starting fires along tinder-dry creek beds.

“It has a huge impact on the creek habitats,” DiFalco said. “We do have wildlife trying to live there.”

“Environmental degradation is everywhere out there,” Barge echoed. “That’s a given.”

The CN&R explored Lindo Channel early on the morning of cleanup day, during the brief window of time where homeless people had vacated their camps but the belongings they left behind remained untouched.

In one camp, hidden by a dense thicket directly behind S&S Produce and Natural Foods, clothing, sleeping bags and bedding were strewn about with seemingly nonessential items—ski boot bindings, Glamour magazine, a children’s bicycle frame and a boombox.

It was a familiar scene to senior park ranger Shane Romain, who is frequently surprised by the objects found at homeless camps.

“I ask questions like, ‘Why do you need all this stuff?’ If I was living outside, I would have the essentials, stuff I could carry on my back,” he said. “There are some individuals with mental illness who have hoarding tendencies. They just bring in more and more stuff.”

Any items valued more than $100 were processed by the Chico Police Department. Otherwise, it all went to landfill or was recycled.

While the number of homeless camps has increased dramatically, the city is ill-prepared to do anything about it. Budget cuts and staff reductions have limited the capacity of both the police department and park rangers to roust the homeless from creek banks.

In the past, they made weekly rounds. Now, with only two full-time rangers and one part-time ranger on staff, “the goal is once a month,” Romain said. (A seasonal park ranger position was eliminated last July.)

Entering the camps has become increasingly dangerous, he said, as many of the inhabitants are armed, and ensuring the safety of the rangers presents limitations. Romain won’t enter a homeless camp without the company of a fellow ranger or a police officer, but it’s rare for two rangers to be on during the same shift. “And the likelihood of getting a cover unit from police … it’s probably not going to happen, because they don’t have the staff,” he said.

Even when those stars align, the effort often is futile. “As soon as we clean up, those camps are back,” Romain said.

He questioned the effectiveness of writing tickets for illegal camping or arresting homeless people with outstanding warrants in the first place.

“We can write tickets all day long; we can arrest people all day long,” he said. “Is it going to change any behavior? Probably not. Is it going to help the person get out of that situation? No. It’s probably just going to make it worse.”

And explaining to homeless people how degrading their camps can be to the surrounding environment is a lost cause, Barge said.

“You’re getting all sorts of folks, from the mentally ill to people who have some sort of criminal record,” she said. “They’re not thinking in the community sense; they’re in survivalist mode. They’re living in a pile of trash, and they don’t seem to mind it. Self-actualization just doesn’t happen.”