The Village of South Jacksonville will consider a public camping ordinance next month.
The Illinois Municipal League issued a model ordinance earlier this month concerning municipal authority in the regulation of camping on public property, specifically as it relates to homeless individuals. The ordinance was drafted after a U.S. Supreme Court decision on the matter saying that it was a matter of local control. The model ordinance maintains a structure of progressive enforcement and penalties.
South Jacksonville Chief of Police Eric Hansell says that the village has had at least two instances of people camping on public property in recent months: “The Village, right now, does not have a camping ordinance regulating camping inside the village. We basically have 2.3 square miles of patrol district and we have no campgrounds. We do have some parks, namely a park and a ball diamond owned by the City of Jacksonville that has timber next to the lake. Over the last couple of years, people have been going in there and cutting down the timber and setting up encampments in there and we’ve had to run them out. With not having an ordinance that regulates it, we have no way to enforce it. There is nothing through DNR law that prohibits camping anywhere. It’s all regulated by the village or the entity that has control over the grounds. With more homelessness and the more immigrants that are coming into our country, we have a lot more travelers that are moving around, and if we don’t have a way to regulate that, they can just set up pretty much almost anywhere; and we have a hard time moving them on or getting them services.”
Hansell says the ordinance only covers publicly owned property like parks, lakes, and recreational areas and not private grounds.
Hansell says enforcement of the ordinance will likely boil down to individuals refusing to move along when told to do so: “We would just be enforcing it by asking them to move on and explaining the ordinance to them – that it is not a designated camping area and you can’t just set up there. The only way that I foresee going farther with enforcement is it is a non-compliance-type of issue. Some people are just misinformed. If you’re homeless and you’re traveling from state to state, you don’t know the laws or you may not have access to the laws to read them. Most people think that you can do almost anything that’s reasonable in a park, and sometimes you can’t. Unless it becomes an issue where an individual is non-compliant or it’s a repetitive issue, I don’t really see us writing tickets for it. I see it as a way of just explaining ‘Hey, you can’t camp here. We are just going to ask that you move on. Here are some services that we offer if you need them, but you can’t camp here.'”
Hansell says that vagrancy isn’t a common problem for the village, coming up about 2-3 times per year, mostly with transients from out of state. He says the number of interactions with homeless transients in the area has increased and he doesn’t see it decreasing anytime soon.
The camping ordinance is expected to garner more discussion at the Village Board of Trustees business meeting scheduled for Thursday night.