After more than two years of frustration from people who live in houses and in tents along interstate corridors, the city of Portland will take over campsite cleanup duties from the state transportation department.

Residents were baffled over whom to contact about trash, needles and other issues they saw along multi-use paths and sidewalks that run along highways. The city had no jurisdiction to clean up homeless camps, and the Oregon Department of Transportation was hard to get ahold of and slow to act, residents complained.

Meanwhile, homeless people who wanted an out-of-the-way spot to stay for a few nights said that they were never referred to social services and often didn’t know whose cleanup schedule they would be rousted by.

Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously approved an agreement with the department of transportation to use the city’s One Point of Contact system to field complaints and prioritize them for cleanup on the city’s schedule.

The partnership also brings a change in the schedule. Campsites will be notified that contracted crews will come to bag garbage and move tents at least 48 hours prior.

That is a compromise between the city’s 24-hour posting minimum and the state’s 10-day notice.

The city also says it tries to connect people who need housing assistance and other services with nonprofit providers. The Oregon Department of Transportation does not, and says its staff cannot, do the same.

Officials are hopeful that the agreement will reduce consternation from neighbors who live in areas with significant camps.

Almost half of the 2,845 complaints from summer 2017 to 2018 about trash, drugs and homeless people in Lents were located on state property. The bike and pedestrian path that runs along Interstate 205 was sought as a refuge by many people living outside after the Springwater Corridor was swept.

The department of transportation cleans these corridors on a set rotation, which meant that those complaints wouldn’t be addressed for months at a time.

It also caused neighbors to flood city and state officials with emails about the conditions on the trail.

While the department of transportation has stepped up its cleanups in recent years, the agency has also been the source of bureaucratic confusion.

According to city documents, Portland Public Schools officials appealed to the city to intervene near Tubman Middle School, where the state owns property along the west end of the school and Interstate 5.

Tent campers blocked the way of maintenance crews trying to work in the area. But the transportation department refused to change its cleaning rotation, leaving both the city and the school district to wait, according to the city.

These types of incidents led city staff to appeal to the state agency to provide consistency in how cleanups are done.

Under the city’s system, complaints are logged with One Point of Contact and are entered into a database. Nonprofit Central City Concern employs many formerly homeless people through its Clean Start program. These crews are dispatched to evaluate which sites in the database need to be cleaned and in what order.

Lucas Hillier, who oversees the city’s campsite cleanup process, said that the Clean Start employees also bring handwarmers in the winter and water in the summer, as well as pass out trash bags and talk to campers.

The city then posts paper notifications at the sites. Cleaning teams, sometimes with the help of police, then remove all garbage, encourage campers to leave the area and store all personal property that is left behind.

The process is controversial among homeless people and advocates who say that is causes unnecessary disruption to people’s lives and causes vital gear -- such as sleeping bags, tents and IDs -- to be lost.

But Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler on Wednesday said that was not the question at hand. Eliminating the jurisdictional issues would at least make the process easier for both housed and unhoused people to understand and comply with.

“This is just one piece of a much, much bigger strategy to help solve this problem,” Wheeler said.

The new system will start Jan. 1, when a recently passed state law that allows the intergovernmental agreement goes into effect.

Over the course of 2019, the city will gradually take over more of the state agency’s duties. For the first six months, state crews will still work on state-owned land, but at the direction of city staff.

The city’s teams will take over all cleanups in city limits by the end of the year.