Enforcement officer Sally Quickfall discovers an abandoned bag of rubbish. The owner of the rubbish is nowhere to be seen and the contents are spilling out over the ground.



A popular freedom camping spot in Takaka currently occupied by hundreds of illegal campers is now out of Tasman District Council's control and the local enforcement officer has been told to not patrol the area.



The Reilly St freedom camping spot located behind the Takaka Memorial Library in Golden Bay has been home to campers sleeping and living illegally in their non self-contained vehicles and campsites for years.



A Stuff reporter visited the area with local enforcement officer on Wednesday night at sundown.



More than 100 vehicles and tents were pitched and parked up in the car park, along the side of the road, right down to the river's edge.

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Hundreds of freedom campers were occupying the area cooking, drinking alcohol, listening to loud music and socialising in scattered groups.

Nina Hindmarsh Illegal freedom campers drink alcohol around an unpermitted fire on the riverbank.

Three uncontrolled dogs roamed free with no sign of the owners. A large non-permitted fire was burning at the river and and several piles of rubbish were strewn around separate campsites.

Enforcement officer Sally Quickfall said she saw the problems at Reilly St as a separate issue to freedom camping.

"It's no longer a tenable job for one person to go in there and that's why we have pulled back," she said.

Nina Hindmarsh Enforcement officer Sally Quickfall walks through the carpark at Reilly St and is asked by the campers on the left if she "wants a beer".

"It's going to become a compliance issue, a police issue and a health and safety issue. It's a whole different issue than freedom camping now and I believe it will need to be tackled by multiple agencies.

"I do poke my nose in there and I will continue to do so because they are in a public area, but for my own safety I wouldn't go in there by myself."

On council-owned land, freedom camping is only allowed for certified self-contained vehicles. People can only camp within one kilometre of a single location for two nights out of every four weeks.

Nina Hindmarsh A sign at the entrance of the Reilly St camp asking residents to be respectful of "others, Mother Nature and yourself".

The only toilet in the area is a compost unit installed recently by locals frustrated by council inaction on the matter.

A group of people who call themselves the "River Tribe" are living permanently in the bush away from the car park. Its occupants are part of a grassroots revolution who claim to have chosen it as a way of life and do not see themselves as transient freedom campers.



Some have said they felt pushed to live this way because of an unjust social system. For others it was a philosophical desire to connect with nature.

The River Tribe maintain the compost toilet at the camp, grow food and recycle. They have erected a sign asking freedom campers to respect the environment.

Nina Hindmarsh Illegal freedom campers are parked all the way down the Takaka river bank on the stones.

Tasman District Council regulatory manager Adrian Humphries said council was very limited in what it could do.

He said the situation was not straightforward because the majority of the car park was privately owned land by the Rose Estate. The council is working with Land Information New Zealand to sort out how to deal with the issue.

"[The enforcement officer's] job is to educate people and give them information about where they should be going. We have no expectation that she should be policing the area, and we don't have any power to fine people in the Tasman district anyway."

"We had wanted to trespass them off that land and to move them elsewhere, but we can't even do that because it's not council-owned land."

He said the issue wasn't just about freedom camping anymore.

"It's about vagrancy, itinerant workers, the housing crisis, people living in cars - it's actually a reflection on society at this present time," he said.

"As a society we have to work out what we tolerate. Whether or not it's acceptable to sleep in a van, and how would you enforce that. People also have to realise that once we get them out of there they will just go somewhere else. They aren't the sorts to use camping grounds."

In February the council is planning to put out a draft freedom camping bylaw, he said.

"The public will then be able to put out submissions about where they want [the freedom campers], what we should do, and we are working with other people to set up more camping grounds around the district."

However, there is confusion about who owns the land.

David Rose, whose family Tasman District Council says owns the land, said he does not own the land, nor does he intend to apply for a "land accretion".

Accretion occurs where a property is bounded by water and further land is added to the property due to gradual and imperceptible changes in the position of the water boundary.

In October, Rose said he confirmed to the council in a letter, as requested by them, that the Rose family do not want to push out their river side fence South of Reilly road by applying for river accretion on this stretch of river. Therefore the ownership would fall on Tasman District Council.