Trespass crackdown
YCSO takes zero-tolerance stance for popular RV site on state land
A tract of state trust land just east of the Foothills has been a draw for years to RVers who would rather park their homes out in the desert than in a more crowded RV park environment.
By all accounts they encountered little to no enforcement of the series of low-set, 10-by-16-inch “no trespassing” signs along Avenue 15E.
As more homes were built across 15E between 48th Street and County 14th Street, residents started using it too, for walking dogs, hiking, riding OHVs and other recreation.
But many weren’t crazy about the additional traffic or disrupted views that came with the dozens of parked RVs.
Neither the Arizona State Land Department nor the Yuma County Sheriff’s Office appeared to have the resources to enforce trespassing against those who didn’t have a permit from the state or didn’t follow its rules, particularly a 14-day annual limit on state trust land camping anywhere in the state.
Everything changed this month, and now there’s a possibility the property could be closed to everyone.
It had been a particularly bad winter for complaints about the RVs on that property, Yuma County Supervisor Darren Simmons said.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” he said, with dozens of campers setting up what in some cases seemed to be semi-permanent domiciles. Residents alleged the RVers were dumping trash and digging trenches to deposit human waste.
Simmons held one of his monthly neighborhood meetings at the Foothills Library on March 11, and the 15E property proved to be the topic du jour, with most of the attendees ask
ing Simmons and a YCSO representative to enforce the rules against those who appeared to be overstaying their permit, if they had one at all.
Robert McClernon, who has his winter home in a neighborhood just off the state land and was at the meeting, said the attendees were told there had been six citations issued there in the past three months.
“Doesn’t sound like a big problem to me,” he said, though he was probably in the minority in that sense.
“I think about 100 percent of the people said they wanted to have some enforcement to make sure that everyone who was camping there had a permit. That was the consensus with everybody,” he said.
“They want the law enforced with some regularity, and the side effect has been they’re going to ticket old ladies. If that’s the case, I think it’s pretty wrong,” he said.
Around the time of that meeting, YCSO embraced a “zero-tolerance” stance on trespassing on the state land on 15E. Campers and other recreational users were asked to show their permits, and if not they were cited for a criminal misdemeanor violation, which carries up to a $1,000 fine.
YCSO spokesman Alfonso Zavala said this week that 11 trespassing citations had been issued in the month ending March 25, eight of them to RV campers and three to locals, at least one of whom had been walking her dog.
All of them were issued on the 15E property, he said, because that’s where the complaints were coming from. None of those cited were accused of anything else, such as dumping trash or waste.
The state land department manages just over 300 square miles throughout the county, according to the Yuma County 2020 Comprehensive Plan.
News of the woman walking her dog, in particular, quickly spread through Nextdoor and Facebook, with some users appalled by what they were hearing about how deputies were interacting with the public.
McClerndon said he knows the woman involved, and friends from out of town who did have a permit to camp in their $250,000 motor home were also confronted by deputies.
“He spent a wad of money here. And you know, he has a choice of where he’s going to go and his choice, after he was done, he said he wasn’t going to come back here anymore. And I think there’s a lot of people who are going to make a decision not to come back, because of the way the enforcement happened,” he said.
McClerndon said he would have wanted YCSO to allow a grace period of public education or handing out warnings about the stepped-up trespassing enforcement.
Sheriff Leon Wilmot said in a letter sent to County Administrator Susan Thorpe last week about the situation that there had been a grace period of two weeks during the enforcement detail, which began after State Land representatives came down and saw the magnitude of RV camping on the property.
State Land has two employees with no enforcement authority, so that duty fell to his department.
“It is the position of my office that the law will be enforced fairly and impartially.
“I can draw no differentiation between a camper from out of state and a local resident who also chooses to willingly violate the clearly posted requirements for a permit,” he wrote.
Simmons said last week he hadn’t received any complaints about how the trespassing law is being enforced, but was concerned because he’d heard the state land department was considering closing off the area entirely, which Commissioner Lisa Atkins does have the authority to do.
“It’s not set in stone yet, and what I’m wanting them to do is just sit there, and if they’re going to close it, just close it to campers, and allow people to still walk and ride their UTV’s on it,” Simmons said, because it’s used to access other desert areas owned by the Bureau of Land Management.
One-year recreational permits are available from the department at land. az.com, for $15 for an individual or $20 for a family.
The permits come with restrictions such as staying on marked trails or paths, and it does specify that at campsites, human waste is to be confined to either a portable toilet or a slit trench covered to ground level.
Applications are, for the most part, accepted on arrival, said State Land Department spokesman Mark Scarp. “The brief and basic information required by permit applicants doesn’t lend itself to deniability,” he said.
He added that around $300,000 a year is collected by the department in permit fees, which are used to repair the effects of squatters, littering and other effects of recreational use, but it isn’t enough to take care of that across the nine million square miles under its control.
State trust land is either leased by the state, as with the APS solar facility in the Foothills, or held before being sold for development. Most of the revenue goes into K-12 schools.
Scarp said some type of closure or added restrictions are being considered.
“The department is trying to investigate all claims and issues surrounding the recreational activity and balance interests regarding State Trust land along Avenue 15E. The Arizona State Land Department has several issues it works through daily; therefore it’s difficult to predict a decision time frame,” he said.
In his letter to Thorpe, Wilmot said he also didn’t want to see a complete closure of the state land, but he doesn’t have the budget to conduct regular patrols of the property to ensure compliance.
He said he is working with the department in hopes of finding money to fund future enforcement efforts, and encouraged the Yuma County Board of Supervisors to speak up in favor of keeping the land open to the public.
Scarp said public comments can be mailed to: Lisa A. Atkins, State Land Commissioner, Arizona State Land Department, 1616 W. Adams St., Phoenix AZ 85007, or emailed to pio@azland.gov.
For now the desert along 15E is empty, likely due to the heat being turned up by both the sheriff and the sun.