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Resident urges boulders, landscaping to deter encampments along Sloan trail; metro said to support idea
Summary
At the May 15 Sunrise Manor advisory board meeting, resident Al Rojas thanked commissioners for cooperation on encampment cleanups and proposed placing boulders and landscaping along a dirt trail from Sahara to Sloan to deter homeless encampments; he said Metro favored the idea but funding and next steps were not specified.
Al Rojas, a Sunrise Manor resident, used the general public comment period on May 15 to thank commissioners for cooperation on large homeless-encampment cleanups and to propose a neighborhood project to deter new encampments along a trail from Sahara to Sloan.
"We've been making major impact on the homeless problems, especially the large encampments, bringing them down," Rojas said, adding that social media has helped the community report reoccupations. He said neighbors cannot comfortably use a dirt lot along the trail because "there's a lot of homeless that stay on these little dirt lots."
Rojas described a deterrent strategy: "I proposed that we put boulders there, not not, square blocks where they could sleep on, but just a bunch of boulders." He told the board he has discussed the idea with Metro, which he said "like[s] the idea" and that he expected follow-up meetings with other local agencies. Rojas acknowledged that funding is unknown and asked the board to consider placing the topic on a future agenda for discussion.
Why it matters: the trail area Rojas described is used by residents for walking and biking; encampments there, he said, limit public access and prompt neighborhood complaints. Rojas framed the boulder/landscaping proposal as a non-structural, low-profile way to limit places where large encampments form while preserving pedestrian access.
The transcript records Rojas’s comments and his statement that Metro supports the idea in concept; the meeting record does not show any board vote, staff commitment of funds or a schedule for follow-up. Rojas also thanked commissioners for cooperation generally on encampment removals and said community reporting on social media had assisted enforcement.
Ending: The board adjourned after routine business; no action on Rojas’s boulder proposal was recorded at this meeting, and funding and agency responsibilities for implementation were not specified.
