Marilyn Gleason: It was advertised [that] this meeting was to be about public safety and fire prevention. Lou Vallario pointed out that in all his years of being the sheriff, this is the only fire that was really ever started from a homeless camp.
Sheriff Vallario: I would say you're more likely to see fires started by lightning strikes. We obviously see them along the highway because of sparks and chains andequipment on the highway. I have to tell you honestly, I've been in law enforcement for 38 years in this community, and this is the only fire that I can recall that was actually caused by somebody who was homeless, living in an encampment on either private property or out on federal land.
Amy Hadden Marsh: You know, I'd like to comment on what I thought was conspicuously absent from that webinar, and that was the property owner.
MG: You were interested in the private property that was inhabited by the homeless people where that fire started and you did some tracking down. Tell me about why that caught your interest.
AHM: Because they weren't there! You know, here are a couple of homeless encampments on private property, or at least one big one on private property, and the private property owner wasn't at the webinar talking about, 'Yeah, we've done this or we've done that,' or, 'Gee, I didn't know about it,' or whatever. When this comes up, usually in public comment, Commissioner Chair Jankovsky sounds like he doesn't know who the property owner is. 'Oh, it's some nonprofit up by Vail.'
During my research, I dug into this a little bit and, among others, I found a Glenwood Springs resident named Laura Speck, who owns the Silver Bead in downtown Glenwood. Her mother's house is the last house on Palmer.
So it's up around there, right around the Palmer Fire. So she was saying that she has worked with Commissioner Jankovsky to organize cleanups and other things. And I know that Commissioner Jankovsky was at the most recent cleanup, because there was a picture of him in the paper.
The history of ownership of that land goes back to 1959, and there's some old Glenwood Springs names associated with that land: David Hammer, Bill Bullock, the Rippy family. But in 2023 - fast forward - the the owner at the time was an Eagle County developer by the name of David Forenza, and he donated that land to Mountain Youth. They do a lot of youth-based activities, sort of like Youthentity in the Roaring Fork Valley. And so I got in touch with them and interestingly enough, the woman I spoke with, she said that, 'well, we sold that parcel on July 17th.' Like a week before this webinar happened and they didn't know about the webinar...and then suddenly I was asking her a few questions, this was by email, suddenly Kevin Armitage. And he actually is the board president. And he said a quote in an email. 'After many months of work and diligence, it was determined that the best course of action for the organization was to sell the land and utilize proceeds from the sale to help best deliver our mission.'
A week before this webinar happened, the land sold or closed. They closed on the land sale and it now belongs to somebody else who is still a mystery.
MG: And presumably it's been under contract during part of the time this summer when people have been living on it. Some of what really struck me at this meeting was, that surprised me, they were taking questions from the public throughout the meeting. That was basically what it was for was to kind of connect with the public and the great majority of questions they were getting were very sympathetic towards the homeless people. And the other thing that really jumped out at me was that idea of this is a revolving door.
That a camp is cleared, the possessions of the homeless people are, you know, maybe taken away and destroyed. And a couple of months later it's, it's back again.
Sheriff Vallario: Couple.. a few years ago the city and the county got a concerted effort to try to clean up some of these areas. Particularly some of the area above [and] behind Walmart. But over on [the] Red Mountain side, like behind of where Target is. Up in there we identified, with the help of the fire department using drones, numerous camps up there. And they pooled their resources. We had a company called Ecos, which is a cleanup thing, everything from, you know, regular cleanups to hazardous materials.
And they came in and helped clean up because we're talking propane bottles, we're talking human waste, we're talking drugs and needles and things of that nature. And I think it was fairly successful. We pulled, literally, I think the, the county had three or four dump trucks full of trash that were pulled out of there.
I wanna say the bill with Ecos was, can't hold me exactly to that, but it was north of $60,000 that it cost the county and the city to get that done. I would say it was successful, but probably within months, weeks, if not weeks, that folks [are] back up there again, camped in various little places and various little spots.
MG: So it's an endless cycle. I would say the current system isn't working. Maybe we need to look at some other solutions.
Lily Jones: Yeah. But I, I'm wondering what we could do in the Roaring Fork Valley that the rest of the country hasn't been able to do. Because they mentioned, and I'm sure we're all aware, that homelessness is not just a problem that we have in Glenwood Springs or the Roaring Fork Valley. This is a nationwide problem. So I'd love to see some creative problem-solving, but I I don't know where we would even begin to start.
