Volunteers who regularly clean up San Jose’s waterways have reported a significant uptick in homeless people camping along Los Gatos Creek.

South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition members say the amount of trash in the creek also has increased as a result, ever since California Department of Fish and Wildlife game wardens recently stopped patrolling the area.

The stretch where most of the homeless encampments have popped up since summer runs from Lincoln Avenue near the Willow Glen Trestle all the way up to where Los Gatos Creek and the Guadalupe River meet near the SAP Center, coalition founder Steve Holmes told the Resident.

“They’re under most of the bridges and down in the vegetation,” Holmes said, adding that the number of campers has tripled from about a dozen to now more than 35.

“This is an area we were sort of able to keep clear for the last year and a half,” he said. “We had minimal encampments in this area.”

Group members “saw a transition” in August when they learned that calls to the CalTIP hotline to report polluters weren’t being routed to the game wardens as usual, he said.

After reaching out to CalTIP headquarters in Sacramento, Holmes was told the calls now go to the game wardens’ managers, who distribute the information.

A local manager he eventually reached “said this was no longer a priority for his game wardens,” Holmes added.

Although he was told “it’s a dangerous type of environment that game wardens shouldn’t be exposed to,” Holmes found that hard to believe because the wardens often have to deal with poachers at night who are armed.

“My gut feeling is you have a middle manager who’s decided he doesn’t want to participate in those activities,” Holmes said.

“It kind of falls outside the realm of what they traditionally do,” such as checking tags during hunting season, he acknowledged, “but we had game wardens since 2012 actively working our streams, and it’s led to huge reductions in the numbers of people camping.”

Michael Milotz, lieutenant specialist for Fish and Wildlife, said the calls are being routed to the wardens, but not after going to their supervisors first.

“I think they’re under the assumption that calls weren’t going through, period,” Milotz added. “That’s not the case, it still is. It’s just normally how it works is if a CalTIP comes in and it’s in progress…it goes right to the warden because they’re the closest to respond to that.

“We did this change statewide, not just for this area,” Milotz said. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of calls coming in about the homeless on our state property as well.”

With new wardens coming on board, Milotz said the agency is trying to use its resources more effectively and “the idea really is to prevent them from biting off more than they can chew.”

He said game wardens now respond to in-progress offenses such as poaching and handle reports of littering and illegal camping later. Where the offenses happen also determines how the agency responds; if an encampment is reported on state property then wardens break it up. But if the encampment is on city or county property they only support local enforcement efforts, for example by providing a pickup truck to haul away trash.

The cycle of removing encampments, cleaning up garbage and then seeing campers return has been “demotivating” for some South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition volunteers.

“When volunteers realize they’re only cleaning up after the homeless and (the homeless) are just going to return, we’re starting to see a decline in the number of people who will come out and support what we’re doing,” Holmes said.

A shortage of San Jose police officers has compounded the problem.

“The other resources like the San Jose Police Department…support the water district and city of San Jose cleanups, but it’s more of a standby,” he said. “If someone is acting out, they’ll step in” but are otherwise hands off.

If the city tackled the problem upfront through patrols, Holmes said it would save “hundreds of thousands of dollars of cleanup costs…versus reacting to the problem on the back end.”

Holmes said he also is concerned that city park rangers now left to patrol the area may be in danger since more than half a dozen homeless people have been killed this year in San Jose.

“The only remaining patrolling group is our city park rangers,” Holmes said, “and in light of the recent uptick in violent incidents along Coyote Creek, there is the very real possibility that these unarmed rangers could run into a lethal situation. Armed patrols need to be the new norm.”

Right now the coalition’s options are limited, but it’s hoping more will emerge.

“It’s pretty limited, is what it is,” he said. “The San Jose Police Department, we know how badly their ranks have been hacked. I guess with things like Measure F, we’d see an improvement in the policing. That would be something that could potentially improve the situation. Measure A funding for the homeless would be a huge improvement.

“Where one door closes you gotta look for other options.”