Hermiston beefs up camping ordinance
By Terry Murry on Friday, October 27th, 2023 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories
HERMISTON – The Hermiston City Council has added some teeth to the camping ordinance that passed more than a month ago. Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said the council members were well aware they would be revisiting the ordinance.
“They wanted to get it adopted as quickly as possible just so that something was in place even though there were some minor changes and tweaks that they wanted to make to it,” Morgan said.
One of those changes was to define just how far a person had to move a car to avoid a citation. Vehicles must be moved one block or 600 feet every 24 hours. The ordinance also bans camping in any cemetery, within 60 feet of a residence, or within 750 feet of a school attended primarily by minors.
Another amendment bans camping in parking lots connected to dwellings.
“That’s to avoid getting into some situations where you may have apartment complexes and the apartment operator decides, ‘Well, hey, I can start charging people $20 just to park in my parking lot,’” he said. “We don’t want to suddenly have an apartment complex’s total parking lot filled up with car camping and then the residents don’t have anywhere to park.”
The amendments will go into effect 30 days after the meeting on Oct. 23.
