Why illegal dumping plagues the city

Jon Horton leads the way through thick brush that covers an old city parks trail near Costilla Street. It's a hot summer day, and the shade of the trees and breeze off Shooks Run Creek provide a welcome respite. The area almost feels like a secret garden.

But a few steps in, the problems with this section of city parks, private and railroad property make themselves clear. Old clothes clog the creek, and by the time the trail dead-ends at an old stone railroad bridge, the trash is everywhere: clothes, broken TVs, shopping carts, decaying mattresses, tires.

There are campsites, too. Some are just mattresses; others tents, including one with a stroller sitting outside it. There are even primitive shelters made of branches and brush spread out across this yellow plain that runs behind the Lowell neighborhood and the downtown Police Operations Center.

Emerging from their shelters, people stare at us some curiously, a few aggressively. Horton, a 73-year-old bear of a man with an impressively bushy white mustache, leans down to my ear. If it makes me feel any better, he says, he has a gun.

It does.

This is Horton's regular walk. A disabled Vietnam vet, he lives nearby in subsidized housing.

"I volunteer to accompany people in my building to take walks with me, but their faces turn pale," he says. "It is considered a very dangerous place."

He isn't fazed. He was homeless once himself, and he feels for others, especially veterans, who have ended up on the streets. He's even built a rapport with some of the people here. But he doesn't care for the garbage that sullies the landscape and likely attracts vermin.

The vacant property, much of which is owned by 78-year-old Tom Doxey of Penrose, has been a problem as long as Tom Wasinger, Colorado Springs' Code Enforcement supervisor, can remember. It was cleaned fairly recently, but Doxey says it doesn't take long for the garbage and campers to return.

Until 2001, Doxey used the property to store materials for his asphalt company. But even in those days, he says, people would come here late at night, cut the fences, and dump their junk. Over the years, Doxey says, he's tried various barricades, even concrete blocks that weighed thousands of pounds, only to have them moved or destroyed.

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Why illegal dumping plagues the city