Deschutes encampment landowner in talks to donate property to conservation group
The owners of the land along Deschutes Parkway where a large homeless encampment sits have tried multiple strategies to get the 70-some individuals camped there to move.
Each time, both Olympia Police and code enforcement officials have declined to get involved.
Recently, the owners came up with a new idea: donate the land to an environmental conservancy.
“The best thing we can do frankly, as I told the people at the city is, we’re looking for a way to responsibly divest ourselves from the property,” said Kevin Murphy, who owns, by his estimate, about 90% of the land where people are camped.
Murphy’s ties to the land
Murphy and his wife, Cynthia, used to live in one of the houses atop the hill above the parkway before moving to Connecticut in 2012. Later, Cynthia’s sister lived in the house.
When they sold the home in 2019, the Murphys retained three large parcels of land at the bottom of the hill that were included with the original sale.
While Murphy owns a majority of the land, previous attempts at removing the camp were led by a coalition of other homeowners who live on the hill above the encampment. A representative of that coalition first distributed 3-day vacate notices to campers on June 23, and, after working with housing advocates to delay for one month, distributed vacate notices again on July 20.
After distributing the first notice, Murphy and multiple other landowners contacted the Olympia Police Department and Code Enforcement Office and asked them to remove the campers.
In an email to Murphy on June 15, an Olympia police sergeant wrote that OPD could not get involved because of the length of time the campers had been there.
“The way things went with the police was, they initially told me you’ve got to fill out a trespass form. I did that, and then they said they were busy with protests, and then they came back and said you’ve got to get with the county, this is an issue for some sort of formal eviction order,” Murphy said.
“In the last couple of months, it became clear that that whole effort with trespass authorization forms and getting law enforcement to assist with removing people from the property was a failure — it’s not going to happen.”
A few months ago, the owner of a neighboring home, who lives in Canada, threatened to sue the Murphys for negligence. The Murphys also received notifications from the Olympic Regional Clean Air Agency (ORCAA) about fires on the property.
“Those two things, when it became clear that we were not going to get law enforcement help, and the fact that people were threatening legal action because of the activity on our property, to me it becomes a big liability to shoulder,” Murphy said.
A nature preserve?
After being put off by the police, Murphy reached out to the Olympia Coalition for Ecosystems Preservation (OCEP), a local group that works to restore and preserve wetlands, shorelines, and other urban ecosystems, about donating the land.
“I’ve had numerous exchanges with [Murphy] and some other neighbors as well,” said OCEP President Dan Einstein, “but there’s no agreement. We haven’t really gone any farther than that.”
“They kind of approached us,” Einstein added. “This is not an opportunity that we went looking for.”
The Deschutes property is one of many sites the organization is looking into for conservation, Einstein said. The organization is mainly focused on the West Bay area.
Besides the encampment, there are other issues with the property that could make it difficult to restore, including possible pollution caused by the railway line. Einstein estimates the site could cost about $30,000 per acre to restore.
“It’s a really complicated site that we’ve only really just begun to look at,” Einstein said. “It’s something that we’re looking at, it’s something we’ve talked about, but there’s been no board decision so far on a direction that we’re going to take or not take.”
Einstein said that while the organization’s focus is solely ecological, he personally feels that the landowners have been caught in the middle of a much larger “socioeconomic issue.”
“Obviously homelessness is an incredibly complex issue, and it seems to me that it should be a collective issue,” Einstein said. “And to a certain extent, I empathize with the landowners who have had the city basically say ‘Not our problem. It’s your problem.’”
Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley said the city has declined the landowners’ requests to get involved because they don’t have any alternative shelter to offer the 70-some people living there,
Stahley also said he believes that forcing the campers to move would be a violation of the governor’s eviction moratorium order, now in effect until Oct. 15.
The city would have a role if the property were to become a nature preserve, however.
According to Stahley, who also met with Murphy, the city would approve a conservation easement, a voluntary legal agreement that limits the property owner’s usage of the land to specific uses, often to prohibit development. Stahley said the city has done conservation easements before with properties bought by OCEP.
Although it would be owned by OCEP, the easement would also give the city some legal rights to the land.
“If Oly Ecosystems should not exist at some point in the future, the city would take responsibility for the property,” Stahley said.
The city would also need to do an environmental evaluation and other research before presenting any plan for the city council to consider. The whole process could take six months to a year, he said.
“It’s very much in the idea stage,” Stahley said.
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