Aberdeen resident Todd Mitchell wanted to do some good for the people living in the parking lot behind city hall and he feels he did just that.

“I believe I was successful in removing the garbage there,” he said on Monday, Jan. 24, one day after a two-day garbage haul and cleanup of the camp. The camp remains. The haul was supposed to be during a four-hour period on Saturday, Jan. 22, but Mitchell came back Sunday, Jan. 23.

Mitchell said he completed his two goals.

“Remove the garbage and help the residents,” he said. “Let them know someone outside a committee or an organization cares.”

For those judging his success by volume, he said he removed about 3 tons of garbage. That’s 6,000 pounds throughout the small parking lot that hosts maybe 15 to 20 tents inside.

“Ten to 15 people were there cleaning up on their own,” he said about the effort on Sunday. “(It was) a very good feeling. I could disgust you with all the things I had to do in cleaning up the garbage.”

City of Aberdeen staff also helped.

“The city was there with their excavator truck and a crew of four (people,)” Mitchell said.

Aberdeen Mayor Pete Schave thought there were several dumptruck loads during Mitchell’s spearheaded cleanup project.

Mitchell wasn’t the only one who helped clean up the camp.

Although the cleanup effort was a one-time deal, Mitchell said, he still wants to fulfill his other goal — to provide a port-a-potty for the residents.

Mitchell said leading up to his sanitation project at the lot that he would provide a port-a-potty for the former Temporary Alternative Shelter Location (TASL) camp, which has been officially closed since July 16, 2021. A few months later, Aberdeen City Council passed a 6-5 vote on Nov. 10, 2021, to add a misdemeanor trespassing charge for those still living there.

A new wrinkle to this is that the unsanctioned encampment is supposed to move before the start of spring, according to Schave.

“We hope to be moving the camp out of there by March 1,” Schave said.

Schave said the city followed federal law and made a map, with yellow highlighted areas, of where campers are supposed to relocate. There will be no city-sanctioned camp.

Part of this is because of the cleanup effort the city has had to do in order to make the area more livable for the residents at the former TASL encampment. Schave said the city has paid $600,000 on cleanup efforts, having sanican toilets around the city, as well as the cleaning for those toilets, since July 2019 when the homeless encampment at “The River” was moved to behind City Hall.

“(We’ve gotten) pushback from the campers,” Schave said. “Campers create problems when city staff goes in there and cleans. We put another sanican close by the existing camp.”

Schave said the city is going to get the area all cleaned up.

“We’re not trying to hurt anybody, but we’ve got to get this cleaned up,” he said. “It is a terrible eyesore. We have ongoing dump disposal fees as it is now. I don’t know what the totals are on that.”

Rick Sangder, director of Aberdeen’s Public Works, said in an email to The Daily World that the unsanctioned homeless camp in the city hall parking lot is being closed at the direction of city council and that Aberdeen Police Department is the lead agency involved.

While public works has a supporting role, it is not tasked with making any decisions, Sangder said.

While Mitchell supports the move, he said, in the time being, that means the homeless residents behind city hall won’t have a port-a-potty, so he still wants to provide them a toilet before they have to move.

Schave commended Mitchell for “the big help,” that Mitchell did in cleaning up the camp between Saturday and Sunday.

“It’s a great thing he’s doing,” he said.

Schave did say it was hard to tell a difference between how the camp looked then to now.

“But it did make a difference,” Schave said. “It did look better than it did last week. Still looks pretty trashy. There’s a lot of junk outside there. Some of the stuff they moved there, it makes you wonder.”