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After a five-month pause, San Benito County staff are preparing to resume clearing homeless encampments along the San Benito River. The effort began in May and was put on hold during the summer as the San Benito County Board of Supervisors grappled with balancing the county’s budget.
The board is now expected to discuss whether to continue the clearing at a public meeting in the coming weeks.
While some vehicles were removed and other clearing continued, most operations were halted in August due to funding cuts.
For the previous fiscal year, which ended in June, the supervisors approved $352,000 to remove rusting cars and debris, dismantle tents and improvised shelters, store residents’ belongings, and fund a full-time officer to prevent new encampments along the entire riverbed.
Only $214,000 of that was spent to clear the area stretching from Hwy 156 to Nash Road, Integrated Waste Manager Celina Stotler told BenitoLink. That effort, she said, was extremely challenging.
“It’s not a small channel of water where you have some encampments side by side,” Stotler said “You’re driving through long periods to get to an encampment. It’s overgrown with poison ivy, bushes and trees, and sometimes you don’t even know there’s an encampment there until you open that up.”
In that section of the river, more than 30 people were told to leave in May and June and were offered services, while the county removed over 40 vehicles and filled more than a dozen 40-yard containers that were taken to the landfill.
Two unhoused individuals, who asked that their names not be disclosed, told BenitoLink this week that after leaving the area one moved to Hollister and the other to the area around Union Road Bridge.
For the current fiscal year, although nearly $140,000 remained unspent from the previous year’s budget, the county allocated just $25,000 to the cleanup effort. About half of that, Stotler said, has already been spent towing vehicles and clearing the area from Fourth Street to Nash Road, which the county considers Phase 2 of the operation. (Phase 1 went from Hwy 156 to Fourth Street Road.)
San Benito County Sheriff’s Deputy Peter O’Day, who patrols the riverbed four days a week, told BenitoLink that while some residents returned to this area in the weeks following the sweep to rebuild encampments, he hasn’t seen anyone try to do so since September.
O’Day said that whenever he sees someone trying to build any improvised shelter, he tells them it’s not allowed and asks them to leave.
Most of the people he encounters these days, he said, are walking dogs, riding horses, bikes, or simply roaming the area.
“I think people are starting to get the message that, unfortunately, this isn’t a place where we can continue to reside,” O’Day said.
The county now hopes to clear upstream from Nash Road to beyond Hospital Road.
For Phase 3, which stretches from Nash Road to Union Road Bridge, Stotler said her team will try to use the remaining funds, since this section has fewer encampments and dumped vehicles, and is more accessible.
To implement Phase 4, from Union to Hospital Road, the county is going to need more funds, as the area contains active encampments. Both Stotler and O’Day said encampments upstream from the Union Road Bridge have grown in recent months. O’Day estimates 20 to 30 people live there.
“We have seen a rise in unhoused encampments going into that area because areas 1 and 2 aren’t available anymore,” O’Day said. “Phase 2 was our first really big lift. It took us a lot of effort to clean. Four is going to be that, but worse.”
To help cover the clearing, the county has secured a $43,000 grant through CalRecycle’s Farm and Ranch Solid Waste Cleanup and Abatement program, which funds the cleaning of range and agricultural lands. The money must first be allocated by the county and is then reimbursed by the state.
Still, the total cost of the remaining phases is uncertain, Stotler said. The effort, she notes, is unpredictable, as a seemingly small dumpsite can end up many feet deep, or her team can find hazardous materials that are more costly to safely remove.
Stotler said she’ll return to the Board of Supervisors within the next month—probably during the meetings of Jan. 27 or Feb. 10—to give an update and ask for the remaining funds to complete the clearing.
“We still have a long way to go,” O’Day said. “And a lot of that’s going to depend just on allocations of the county budget.”
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