Suburban Squatters Find Private Uses for Public Land

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Parks Under Siege

In parks across the Washington region, neighbors are encroaching onto the public land. The incursions have spurred discord in quiet cul-de-sacs and a sharp debate over citizenship, the environment, and just what makes a park a park.

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Matthews, who now lives in Naples, Fla., said he had no inkling, until getting a call this year. He sold the property in 2005.

"We knocked the ball back and forth. What can I tell you?" he said.

"I wouldn't have ever done it on parkland, if that's the case. Not so much because I'm a do-gooder; I just wouldn't have taken a chance on something like that. That's crazy," he said. "You've got to be a real gambler to say, 'Hey, I'm going to put my garage on parkland.' "

Officials want the court out. Attempts to contact the current owner for comment were unsuccessful.

Groups of neighbors sometimes break the rules together.

Leslie Hemsworth has mowed a half-acre or more through Chantilly's Cub Run Stream Valley Park for years. Half of the family's white shed with sliding windows is on parkland, according to park records, along with a pink-and-purple slide and a trampoline where Hemsworth's daughter bounced one recent evening.

Neighbor Edwin Duran's wooden train sits in the park. So does the invisible fence for his two boxers, which juts deeply into the park.

Park officials have instructed Hemsworth and the Durans to stop mowing and to remove their property. They, so far, have not.

"I love nature, but not literally at my back door," said Hemsworth, a mother of five. One neighbor has Lyme disease, another poison ivy, she said. When her family camped in the yard, a seemingly rabid fox circled the tent.

"They're saying 'stop.' We're just trying to raise our kids in a healthy environment," she said. "If I didn't cut it, I would have everything in my face." Her problem is with the tall grass, she said, and she could accept the land being reforested.

A few doors down, Stephen Hocker's shed, filled with tools and equipment, sits mostly in the park. "In all honesty, it's wrong. It prevents someone else from using it," Hocker said. He was told to ditch the shed a couple of years ago, and he is building a new one. He removed his fence from the park earlier but is resisting demands that he stop mowing.

Encroachment has made for some awkward moments among neighbors. An anonymous call shut down the carefully tended Frisbee course in woods near Springfield, for instance, prompting finger-pointing.

As Hemsworth spoke with a reporter, Roger Wheeler, who lives between her and the Durans, stepped out of his house for a closer look.

Hemsworth turned her back. "It started with them," she said.

For months, Wheeler has peppered parks officials with e-mail reports. "This evening starting at 8:00 PM finishing at 8:55 PM Maureen Duran mowed the park property . . . with a lawn tractor using head lights," he wrote April 29.

His wife, Cheryl Wheeler, heads a senior center and works part time for Fairfax parks as a naturalist, showing children butterflies and plants. She said she wants the parkland to become a hardwood forest, despite the mosquitoes "and everything suburbanites are annoyed by."

"Using park property as if it was your own does not prevent you from getting ticks," she said. "Provide your kids insect repellant and don't teach your kids to steal."

Edwin Duran said he is not taking anything away from the public and has improved the community.

"Anyone can come and use this area, so we haven't really been stealing anything," he said. Monty and Missy chase away the tick-carrying deer, he said, and the mowed areas are great for neighborhood ballgames. Duran said that he is asking for permission to keep the dog fence but that he will comply with any final ruling.

"It definitely has increased property values, rather than decreased, by us maintaining this little buffer area," Duran said.

One of the dogs approached area park manager Ed Richardson last month during an inspection. He said that he didn't feel threatened but that some park visitors might. Although he's sympathetic to some of the mowers' concerns, he said, park property needs to be protected.

"My thought is: If it's minor, it should be easily corrected, and if it's major, it shouldn't have happened in the first place," he said.

Anyway, he said, even without the encroachment, it's illegal for unleashed dogs to run in the park.