There’s danger out there in the woods. The Board Shanty fire and the more recent Devil’s Slide fire near Dollar Mountain brought that into focus recently.

Makeshift homeless camps, illegal marijuana grows, and personal junkpiles, like the one where the Board Shanty Fire originated, dot Josephine County’s rural landscape and have neighbors on edge because the fire risk is so high. Recently, after a fire broke out on Devil’s Slide near Dollar Mountain, several serious concerns surfaced. Could better land use regulations help prevent these situations? Does Josephine County even have an ordinance spelling out what happens if you let junk pile up on your property or camp out where sanitation and fire could be a problem? And if it does, are there enough people employed by the county to enforce such regulations?

In 2013, an attempt was made to strengthen county codes to make it easier for inspectors to cite violators. Still, this effort was rejected by property rights advocates who opposed the government's intervention in land use decisions. In 2022, another attempt was made to improve the county’s land use codes, aimed at illegal marijuana grows full of junk, ramshackle buildings, and systems designed to steal their neighbors’ water. That, too was shot down by former Sen. Art Robinson and his merry band of property rights advocates who took the matter to the voters and framed it as government overreach.

Currently, because Josephine County does not have an adequate code enforcement framework, the county has to go through the long process of taking people who allow unsafe conditions on their property to court, which can get expensive and time-consuming.

Even if these efforts at improving the codes necessary to keep the county safe had succeeded, the current Board of Commissioners went on a firing spree recently and got rid of most of the people whose job it was to inspect and cite people for violations. 

At their July 24 Weekly Business Meeting, Commissioners professed to be “very concerned” about the homeless camp at the base of Dollar Mountain, with Commissioner Chris Barnett saying even though it isn’t really a county concern, he is on it and will make sure something gets done about that mess. Meanwhile, neighbors in the area say they were on a path to getting rid of the camp but the county fired the people trying to make it happen.

Should there be another attempt at improving county codes so inspectors can cite violators without going through a tedious and costly court process? Should people who live next to dangerous situations demand the county maintain enough staff to make sure fire hazards are reduced? Maybe, after dealing with those who treat their property as personal dumps or allow it to be taken over by homeless camps, a code enforcement ordinance should be given another try.