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A new team developed by the city of Calgary is tackling the issue of illegal homeless encampments along the city’s rivers and in forested areas.

The Joint Encampment Team (JET) was created in response to a sharp rise in reported complaints of the camps since the economic downturn, according to Ward 9 councillor Gian-Carlo Carra.

“Literally [complaints] doubled from about 400-500 a year to almost 1,000 a year. When that happened, my office started getting a lot of those calls,” Carra said.

READ MORE: Calgary homeless wait out cold in makeshift camps

In the past, the City of Calgary’s Partner Agency Liaison (PAL) team would deal with camps. The group would approach homeless encampments and connect its users to social services like shelters.

However, cleaning up a camp once it was vacated could take a long time depending on where it was located. Responsibility for clean-up would change depending on if the land belonged to one city department or another.

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“Dealing with who and what and the clean-up and everything, it was spiralling out of control,” Carra said.

The new JET group will continue to connect people living in the camps to social services, but will also be responsible for quick and safe clean-up.

As it works, the team will also collect information to be used in the future.

“We’re collecting a lot of data. I think we’re going to be able to understand more and more the who’s, what’s and why’s of this, and be able to resource it better and deal with it better as we go forward,” Carra said.

The pilot project will be evaluated at the end of 2018.