Within three weeks, Orange County officials plan to clear the county’s largest homeless encampment, an entrenched tent city along the Santa Ana River in Anaheim and Orange where several hundred people now live and sleep, the Register has learned.

Anaheim City Council members Kris Murray and Tom Tait and Orange Councilman Mike Alvarez said Thursday they were aware of the county’s impending action, with Murray saying it would come “within the next month or so.” Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer later confirmed that the county will clear the encampment on Jan. 22.

County spokeswoman Carrie Braun, who wouldn’t confirm the timing of the encampment removal, said the county needs to close the area for an “environmental remediation project” and because the flood control channel wasn’t safe for human habitation. Spitzer said the county would attempt to link the displaced people with shelter.

The county will post notices on Tuesday along the riverbed warning homeless people that they soon will have to relocate, Spitzer said.

Homeless advocates immediately denounced the county’s plan as illegal and inhumane, saying it perpetuates a system that makes it a crime to be homeless and simply shuffles people from one location to another. They said there aren’t enough shelter beds or permanent housing to lodge all the riverbed homeless and that the displacement will send upwards of 1,000 homeless people spilling into adjacent cities.

The county’s action will culminate its yearlong attempt to remove people living along the flood control channel – a process that has incrementally shuttered other encampments along 30 miles of Santa Ana River, concentrating people in a short stretch in Orange and Anaheim.

“We’re not going to allow this to become Orange County’s Skid Row, and that’s the way it’s operating now,” said Spitzer, whose district includes the large encampment. “This is the northern gateway to our county and it’s not safe for habitation, especially during the anticipated rainy season.”

Homeless people have been sleeping along the county’s flood control channel for at least a decade, but the encampments there have grown substantially during the past two years, a period in which homelessness increased by 8 percent countywide. The encampments have riled local residents, cyclists and business owners, who claim the homeless camp increased property crime in the area. That has included persistent complaints from representatives of the Honda Center and Anaheim Angels.

County leaders have said over the past year that unlike other riverbed homeless encampments, they were hesitant to clear the Anaheim and Orange camps without first opening a shelter where those people could relocate. Spitzer said that’s because U.S. District Judge David O. Carter – who heard a February lawsuit about the county’s move to evict another riverbed homeless encampment – advised the county it shouldn’t displace some riverbed residents until it had shelter for them.

Spitzer said the county’s thinking changed in October when the sheriff’s department reported that 83 percent of the 1,093 riverbed homeless they contacted refused help with public services or finding housing. That came shortly after the county hired a contractor to link the riverbed homeless with housing, a project that has found shelter for 156 people to date.

Spitzer, who expects that the county will be sued once it clears the encampment, said county attorneys eventually could present the sheriff’s department data in court to prove “we don’t need a bed-for-bed replacement plan.”

“We know on the records with their names that they don’t want services,” he said.

But homeless people, their advocates and even county documents dispute the sheriff’s department statistics. In September, only a month prior to the sheriff’s department survey, information in a county newsletter stated that 81 percent of homeless people living in the riverbed “are interested in case management services which means they are receptive to services and working towards the pathway to housing.”

Eve Garrow, homelessness policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Orange County office, has noted that 34 of the county’s cities have anti-camping ordinances that criminalize the act of sleeping in public spaces. She said those laws, and the police who enforce them, often forced homeless people to move to the riverbed in the first place. Homeless people living along the river frequently say they came to the area to avoid police harassment.

“If the county wants to get people out of the riverbed, it has to provide them an alternative,” homeless advocate Mohammed Aly said. “There’s no place for people to go.”

On Thursday, only 21 of 525 beds were empty at the county’s two year-round homeless shelters, while 163 of 400 beds were unfilled at its seasonal armories.

The area’s closure also will reroute a portion of the Santa Ana Bike Trail, which will remain closed for nearly three months. County CEO Frank Kim wrote in an internal memo that homeless people won’t be allowed to camp there again when it reopens.

Some elected officials from adjacent cities, including Murray, applauded the county’s plan to end the riverbed homeless camp. But others said Thursday that they fear the county’s action will push the homeless to residential streets.

“We’re going to have to brace for it, because they’re going to have to go somewhere,” Orange City Councilman Mike Alvarez said. “We’ll be looking for (our) police to come up with some sort of strategy to deal with it.”

In May, county Supervisor Shawn Nelson proposed opening a temporary homeless shelter on county-owned land in Irvine, Huntington Beach or Santa Ana to house the riverbed homeless, but his colleagues didn’t support the plan. County officials said they are still looking for a location to open a third year-round homeless shelter.

On Thursday evening, people living in the riverbed encampments bristled at news they’d soon have to move.

Anthony Strange, 40, who said he became homeless two years ago after his teenage daughter died in a car accident, said he had “no clue where I’m going to go.” Strange said he has been on the county’s waiting list for housing for several months.

Justin Forsyth, 28, who had been homeless in Anaheim prior to moving to the river last year, had a clearer idea of where he’d end up.

“I’ll go back to the city,” Forsyth said. “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”