By Neil Farrell
Small groups of homeless people lingered along The Embarcadero, their possessions piled on the sidewalk.
A man rode a bike down the Harborwalk bike lane, trailing a second bike with him. Another man toted black trash bags stuffed with presumably his possessions, balanced precariously as he pedals away from the work crews.
Such was the scene on the approach to the City of Morro Bay’s Dec. 10-11 mass cleanup of homeless encampments in both the sand dunes along the Harborwalk, and along Morro Creek, a short distance away.
City Manager David Buckingham and Police Chief Amy Christey led a cadre of City workers, and reporters on a tramp through the creek and into woods growing at the rear of Lila Keiser Park. Two representatives of Dynegy, which owns most of the effected property, also tagged along.
A large pile of stuff — bicycles, a wicker trunk, and miscellaneous other things — was piled alongside the fence bordering the Fishermen’s Gear Storage Yard. This is stuff the owner had gathered in advance of the cleanup.
Another man, a well-known local fellow, was hurrying to try and salvage what he could. He shouted at the City work crew, because he thought he had until the next day (Dec. 11) to get his stuff out.
Buckingham spoke to him, and the man, who will not be named for this story, rushed back and forth across the dry creek bed, into a thicket to grab more of his items.
Asked how he was? He replied, “I’ll be OK. I’m a survivor.” He revealed that he’s been living in the creek for 12 years.
Traversing well-worn paths meandering through the creek bed, several encampments appear, scattered amongst poison oak and trees that have been pruned to make clearings.
On a rise above the creek, at the edge of the woods, another local man, who grew up in Morro Bay and raised a son here, was startled by the work crew but resigned to the fact that they were there to move him out.
He had a tremendous amount of stuff including a 4-man tent with a mattress inside, a bedroom in the woods.
Police officers and City workers combed through his somewhat meager belongings, helping him sort though it, identifying so-called personal possessions that he would keep, and what would be thrown into a roll-off garbage dumpster.
It was the third dumpster put out by Dynegy in advance of the cleanup. The other two had already been filled and hauled away. The homeless folks have been doing some self-cleaning, too.
“Hey Neil,” the man called out to this reporter. “Please don’t put my picture in the paper.”
The City has been posting flyers for more than a month in advance of the cleanup, the first since 2010.
Chief Christey said on Thursday that they had met no resistance and to her knowledge, no one had been ticketed. Some 20 City employees took part, along with 24 California Conservation Corps., members. Buckingham said they spent about $13,000 on the cleanup. Dynegy put up $10,000.
Buckingham explained that they were focused on cleaning out rubbish the City is concerned might wash down to the beach and the ocean with winter rains. Buckingham and Christey were the first ones to go into any camps, he said, attempting to connect them with social workers.
He held a “City directive,” which he said outlined the way they would go about the task and justifying the City’s confiscation of personal property. They marked with caution tape what they considered personal property, Buckingham said, to set aside and separate what is clearly trash.
Then a “personal property team” of City workers bagged those items and marked them with the person’s name or the location of the camp. Those items were taken to the City maintenance yard and stored. Buckingham said people must go to the Police Department and be escorted to the yard to retrieve their stuff. In 90 days, it will all be thrown away.
Once the personal property was removed, Buckingham said the CCCs bagged up the rest as trash.
Buckingham said they appreciated the self-cleaning that was done and acknowledged there are no dumpsters put out anywhere that the homeless could use. “There are none here permanently,” he said. “We don’t want to encourage camping.”
As for where these folks are supposed to go, if what happened after the 2010 cleanup is repeated, most will move right back into the Morro Creek woods and the sand dunes — a population of survivors, starting over.
