Enforcement Services says it is continuing to monitor and remove tents that pop up outside of Rotary House in Grande Prairie. Sergeant Charlene Gallant says they’ve received numerous complaints and if they see tents as well as people living on city property they have to be removed.
“Our protocol is to go over there and ask the people to take the tents down. That’s not a tenting area… We go over there and ask them to take them down, if they don’t take them down then we need to go over and assist and make sure the structures get removed from city parks and recreation facilities.”
Gallant says she doesn’t believe the number of tents they seen lately has increased due to Rotary House’s overcrowding issues and says they commonly see numbers fluctuate from day to day.
“Somedays we can find up to eight to 10 tents there and other times when we go there, like this morning, there was three.”
People are given warnings and a time limit to remove all items before contractors come and take the rest. Gallant says if they can’t find the owner of the belongings, things like tents and clothing are usually thrown out and any IDs or valuable items get sent to the RCMP detachment.
“If we’re there and find personal items or identification if we knew the person we would make sure that we handed it back to them. If we can’t find them then that type of found property definitely gets turned over to the RCMP.”
Anyone concerned about missing items like IDs can head to the RCMP detachment to try and claim them.