The city of Durango has a trespassing ordinance that says it is “unlawful for any person to camp or shelter in or upon any city owned or managed property.”
It’s a common ordinance. More than 100 of U.S. cities adopted similar municipal laws last year.
And as law enforcement officers charged with “protecting the vulnerable and preventing crime,” Durango police officers enforce that law.
“Our job is public safety,” said Police Chief Brice Current.
The people who are on the receiving end of that enforcement – such as the 12 who were asked Thursday to leave a piece of city-owned property south of Espero Apartments – naturally ask where they should go.
“We don’t know where we’re going,” said Shaylene Brassard, standing atop the hill above the Durango Tech Center on Friday morning, her belongings in a wagon at her side.
City park rangers told her she was legally allowed to camp on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management near Hogsback.
“That’s where they want us – up over that ridge,” she said, pointing toward the 40-degree slope.
It’s not somewhere she can haul her belongings. And even the hill up to the top of the Tech Center is too large a burden for Terry “Gypsy” Woody, who is camped in the same open plot of land. The 60-year-old uses a walker and has congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He had a stroke one year ago and has to take three rest breaks when walking from the Animas River up to Espero.
But the job of directing people where to go is not one that can fall entirely on the shoulders of law enforcement, Current said. It’s a question with which elected policymakers must contend.
“The city of Durango has done more than almost any city I’ve ever seen,” Current said, citing Espero and the Best Western conversion, both projects the city has supported that will ultimately create 160 units of low-income housing.
Both Gypsy and Brassard have been waiting for months to get into housing, a long-term solution to their problem and the city’s. But in the short term, on the day Gypsy was told he had to move his camp, there’s nowhere for him to go.
The cycle is one that descends on local communities, but is fed by outside forces, city officials say.
“We have a role to play, but I think the larger role has to come with all our partners in the community, and that’s the state and the federal government also,” said Mayor Pro Tem Gilda Yazzie.
Law enforcement’s position in that cycle is not just a game of whack-a-mole, Current said. Officer-initiated contacts along Roosa Avenue, a once-popular camping spot for houseless people, are down 50% this year.
“There needs to be a universal understanding that there simply is not enough services and there’s not enough housing vouchers,” said Kathleen Van Voorhis, the co-founder and CEO of the Community Investment Alliance, which runs a bridge housing and street outreach program in Southwest Colorado. “And even if there are vouchers, there’s not enough housing for these individuals to go into.”
That point is not lost on Current. Nor is the lack of substance use and mental health treatment, a direly needed resource that could address some of the people law enforcement have a difficult time helping.
“We don’t have treatment in this area, and that’s the real investment that we (need) that no one is discussing,” he said.
Instead, officers end up trying to weigh compassion with their allegiance to the law.
“Police officers are between a rock and a hard place,” Van Voorhis said.
Gypsy and Brassard both described a sort of detente they had reached with code enforcement in recent weeks.
“The agreement that I had made with the park ranger (was) as long as we kept it cleaned up and tidy and didn’t let it (trash) get all piled up (and) maintained everything, we were fine,” Gypsy said.
He had a notice tied to a tree, signed by Van Voorhis, saying he was connected with the Alliance and on a wait-list for housing.
But that can only last for so long. And when more people moved onto the land and the trash started to pile up, city officials took action and asked campers to leave. The city removed six truckloads of debris totaling approximately 8 cubic yards of material, according to a news release.
When people like Gypsy and Brassard ask where they should go, the answer – or even who is responsible for forming it – is hard to pin down.
“I don’t have a solution. I’ll keep thinking on it,” Yazzie said.
The reality, Van Voorhis said, is that the community is managing something that doesn’t have a real solution until more housing units and more services are available.
“There needs to be a radical reenvisioning and understanding of what the need is and how we’re going to provide an entire continuum while these people wait,” she said.
rschafir@durangoherald.com
