When the sailboat finally sank, leaving its mast and part of its hull sticking up above the waters of the Willamette River, it spurred a flurry of action at Sellwood Riverfront Park.

For months, residents of the Sellwood neighborhood in Southeast Portland and other visitors to the park had noticed five or six boats tied to the public dock. Many were piled high with belongings and they attracted groups of people who often hung out on them.

Visitors found it harder to access the water and worried about where the trash and sewage from the boats were ending up.

When the sailboat sank toward the end of July, residents like Scott MacLean pushed hard for city government to do something about it.

“You give these people notices but no one ever tows them, so over time these boats have all started sinking,” MacLean said. “There’s sunken boats up and down the river.”

The Sellwood park boats are part of a larger issue that city, county and state agencies are struggling to tackle. Since the start of a new funding cycle on July 1, these agencies have ramped up efforts to clear abandoned and derelict vessels from Multnomah County waterways – which number close to 150 at last count.

In just over a month, two agencies alone — the Oregon State Marine Board and Department of State Lands – have spent about $50,000 to remove a dozen boats from the Willamette and Columbia rivers, according to Marine Board program manager Josh Mulhollem.

That includes 10 boats seized from the Swan Island Lagoon on July 26, an operation that the agencies had to hold off on for more than a year for lack of funding.

The number of abandoned and derelict vessels around Portland has “taken off dramatically” over the last few years, Mulhollem said, and the two agencies quickly ran through most of their money in the first year of the last two-year funding cycle.

Now, Mulhollem said, they’re playing catch-up.

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In the last two years, the Marine Board spent nearly all of its $150,000 budget to remove 45 vessels from public waterways in Oregon. Most of them — 37 — were near Portland, in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Columbia counties. Each cost several thousand dollars to remove.

The agency must stretch its budget to cover the entire state, but Multnomah County has by far the biggest share — 147 vessels currently require cleanup in the county alone, according to a count earlier this year by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

“If you do the math, we’re going to struggle to get the whole way to June 30, 2021, at the current rate we’re going,” Mulhollem said. “This problem is bigger than all of us can deal with.”

“Non-compliant” vessels in the Portland area refer to abandoned boats and those not seaworthy, not properly registered or otherwise breaking the rules in some way, said Sgt. Mark Herron, who leads the Sheriff’s Office’s boat removal efforts.

While numbers for previous years aren’t available because this is the first year the Sheriff’s Office used a new counting method, it’s clear from observation that it’s a growing problem, Herron said.

That’s cause for concern, said Justin Russell, who manages the Department of State Lands’ abandoned boat cleanup program. The boats can take up space at public docks or release trash and sewage into the water, he said.

“A lot of the boats are not in a good state of repair, so there’s a lot of boat sinkings,” Russell said. “And when the boats sink, the owners tend to walk away, and the taxpayers, our agencies, are left to get them out of the water.”

Sellwood Riverfront Park's dock was closed for two weeks to allow officials to ensure its structural integrity after a sailboat tied to several trees sank.Mark Graves/Staff

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For MacLean, the boats tied to the dock at Sellwood Riverfront Park were so obstructive that he contacted the city seven times by email and phone to have them removed.

MacLean, a 54-year-old real estate agent, said he uses the park a few times a week for walking and paddleboarding and had seen the boats there, completely encircling the dock, for the past several months.

City ordinance prohibits keeping vessels tied up there overnight, but MacLean said the boats blocked access to the water and left no space for temporary docking.

He felt frustrated that the boats’ owners had let some of them deteriorate to the point of sinking.

“Boat ownership comes with responsibility and hopefully a sense of stewardship towards the water and other boaters,” MacLean said.

About a week after the sailboat sank, Portland Parks & Recreation — which manages the Sellwood dock and is responsible for removing abandoned vessels there — posted notices telling the boat owners that they would have to move.

The sunken sailboat had been tied to several trees and was threatening the dock’s structural integrity, said Parks & Recreation spokesman Mark Ross. Officials closed the dock for two weeks starting on Aug. 7 so the bureau can conduct safety tests, he said.

The sunken sailboat’s owner managed to remove the boat himself, sparing the city the towing costs. But over the past five years, Portland Parks & Recreation has removed seven boats from all of its properties along city waterways at a cost of $12,470, which it shared with the Marine Board. The agency operates five parks with public docks.

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The problem with abandoned vessels goes hand-in-hand with the city’s homelessness crisis, Russell said, with many people turning to boats as a form of shelter when they can’t find housing elsewhere.

In the last few years, he’s seen more clusters of boats in areas such as the North Portland Harbor and around Ross Island, often connected to homeless camps on the beach.

For the most part, the State Lands Department doesn’t go after people who appear to be living on their boats as long as they abide by a state law requiring them to move five miles away after 30 days, Russell said. For those whose boats get confiscated because they break the rules, the department sometimes works with homeless services agencies such as JOIN to offer alternative housing solutions.

Quinn Colling, an outreach coordinator for JOIN, said often people prefer to live on the water rather than in a camp or at a homeless shelter.

“A lot of people living on the water wouldn’t consider themselves homeless,” Colling said. “They have a roof, they have a functioning toilet, they have a way to cook their food. People feel secure and safe and self-sufficient.”

When authorities enforce the 30-day rule, it affects their sense of safety, Colling said.

“People are trying to get their needs met in any way possible, trying to be close to services, where they work, their communities of support,” he said. “When you’re having to move frequently it impacts all of that.”

For Mulhollem, though, the major problem with people occupying boats in the water is what happens once the boats no longer function.

Sunken boats are three times more expensive to remove, Mulhollem said, and once one reaches that point, agencies are just “treating the symptom” of a larger problem.

Instead, he said the Marine Board is trying to prevent those boats from becoming abandoned in the first place.

“We’re telling people that they need to have an end-of-life plan for your boat,” Mulhollem said. “Watercraft eventually become obsolete, and part of owning a watercraft is knowing you’ll have to dispose of it.”

-- Diana Kruzman; dkruzman@oregonian.com; 503-221-5394; @DKruzman