Suburban Squatters Find Private Uses for Public Land

By Michael Laris
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 23, 2008

A Chantilly family carved a half-acre lawn out of county parkland.

A neighbor put up an invisible dog fence, padding his yard with thousands of square feet of public land to give boxers Monty and Missy more room to romp.

At the Bethesda Park condominium near Rockville, a cement area used for a dumpster and junk collection sits on parkland so it doesn't take up parking or mar residents' views.

"It's not a park. It's woods. It's a forest," said General Manager George Hedrick, adding that the setup has been in place for decades. "Nobody goes there. It's not like there's a tot lot right next door."

In parks across the Washington region, neighbors keep creeping into the commons. Whether sneaky, stubborn, earnest or oblivious, these modern-day squatters have been nibbling at public land with verve. There are gardens and sheds, a Frisbee golf course and ball courts. 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.

"We call it encroachment. That's just a very kind, politically correct word for trespassing," said Michael Rierson, resource protection chief for the Fairfax County Park Authority.

There are no regionwide tallies, but it is clear that authorities are struggling to keep up. Violations can linger for years. Officials have lacked the resources, and at times the inclination, for stern enforcement.

"We just have four inspectors, and we have close to 400 parks. . . . We try to do as much as we can," said Mitra Pedoeem, chief of construction for Montgomery County parks, whose inspectors handle border enforcement. "A lot of encroachments have been removed, but there are still a lot of them," she said, adding that the potential $50 fine isn't much of a deterrent.

In Fairfax, building or encroaching on parkland is a Class 4 misdemeanor punishable with a $250 fine. Officials can force compliance in court and collect costs. But the legal system is rarely used.

When a violation is pointed out -- by a neighbor or a park employee who happens through the woods -- reactions range from chagrin to entitlement.

On a recent morning, Fairfax parks surveyor David Kimbrell was tromping through knee-high grass with a squealing yellow metal detector.

Behind a two-story brick home in McLean, he found two buried pipes marking the property line and a long wooden fence cutting off a hefty wedge of Little Pimmit Run Stream Valley Park. Shut off from the public, through an arbor entangled with fuchsia flowers, were flower beds, lawn and a strawberry patch.

"Hey, it belongs to everybody. The more you whittle it away, the less there is to see," Kimbrell said.

William Gibb, the property's owner, said he has called a contractor. "Once it comes to your attention, you correct it. I think that's the responsible thing to do," he said.

Gibb declined to say whether he knew he was taking parkland when he had the fence built in 1990.

"We didn't really focus on it at the time," Gibb said. His $1.6 million property also has a pool out back. But, he said, "the pool, I'm sure, is in our property line."

Violators are easily missed. In Fairfax, parks cover 24,000 acres, nearly 10 percent of all land. Even after discovery, delays can mount.

In a September 2000 letter, Fairfax officials told Dennis Byrne that a "large area" of a park beside his home south of Reston had encroachments, including "part of a gate, wire fencing, horseshoe pits, two evergreen trees and a portion of an asphalt court" with a basketball hoop. They said they might discuss sparing the sliver of the court in the park "pending your good faith efforts mitigating the other encroachments." They gave him until the end of September.

Byrne seemed keen to try to take legal control of the parkland, officials said, but they told him squatters rights don't apply to parks.

An inspection in April found "no progress," according to a database maintained by Fairfax parks officials to track dozens of violations and potential violations. Late last month, parkland remained fenced in as part of his yard, and Byrne declined to comment.

Rierson, the Fairfax parks official, said there has long been a reluctance to bring the legal hammer down on residents. Environmental education is easier with a soft sell, he said, and most people quickly pull back when asked to.

"Sometimes that doesn't work and people say 'so what' and walk away," Rierson said. But he added: "Encroachments are an illegal act. You will pay the consequences. . . . It might not be next month, or even within the year, but it will happen."

Often the consequences are left to later owners.

Edward Matthews added a tennis court to his Oakton home in the 1980s. A significant amount of it is in Little Difficult Run Stream Valley Park, according to park records.

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.