Parking Limit : A New Breed of Camper Works Every Day, Lives in a Park at Night, and Moves Every 2 Weeks

Leah Vreeland has permission from the public school system to teach her children at home, only home for the Vreeland family is in a park.

For 2 weeks out of the month, home is a space at the Featherly Regional Park in Anaheim where the family of seven sets up camp in a small but modern trailer. At the end of the 2 weeks, to get around park rules, they pack up and move to a camp site at Lake Perris. But in 2 weeks, they return again to Featherly.

The Vreelands are among the new breed of overnight campers who are changing the face of Orange County recreational parks.

Some might call them homeless, but Leah Vreeland insists that this is her family’s home, and that they chose this life style. Her husband, a mechanic, goes to work every day, and for 2 1/2 years has been returning home at nights to a park.

‘Cheaper and Better’

“We had been staying at motels, but we decided camping was cheaper and better,” Leah Vreeland said. “You get to see more.”

This week, the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to require overnight campers at county parks to produce a driver’s license before they are allowed to register. The new rule is merely formalizing a policy that had already been put into practice, but it also makes the penalty for abusing park services tougher. Now, when campers are evicted from the park, they are not allowed to return for an entire year, instead of just for 60 days.

Rangers say the requirement is just one more tool they can use to manage park crowds that no longer are just people looking for an overnight camping adventure.

“Parks have gotten away from the recreational purposes they were supposed to have,” said O’Neill Regional Park ranger Steven Farrar. “Most of us in the park system don’t have any training in social welfare, in police science. But unfortunately, our skills in camps and parks are less and less in demand.”

Overnight camping is allowed at Featherly, O’Neill and Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano, and an increasing number of campers are families who have no other home.

Farrar and Featherly park ranger John Bovee say the driver’s license requirement was not aimed at keeping out homeless people. Both parks have an increasing population of “locals” who essentially make their home there, they said. But the requirement will make it more difficult for campers to abuse the park system’s 15-day maximum stay policy, and will make it easier to evict scofflaws.

“We probably have a dozen evictions each month,” Farrar said. “But no one has been barred from the facility because they were homeless and had no place to go and were trying to get over the 15-day limit.”

He said evictions are for threatening violence, harassing park rangers or other campers, or destruction of property.

“I would have to say it was primarily aimed at the troublemakers in the system,” he said.

The 15-day rule applies to overnight camping in all county parks. In other words, Farrar explained, if a family stays at one park for 7 days, it can only stay at another Orange County park 8 more days that month, according to the rule. But it can return the following month. Park rangers have no way of knowing where else the campers have stayed except to telephone each other about campers they suspect are abusing the policy.

At both parks, there were several families whose campsites were their only homes. But that practice is more common at Featherly, rangers say, than other county parks simply because it has better access to job sites, to the freeway--it is off the Riverside Freeway--and social service agencies.

Penny and Joseph Szlavikovics live in a tiny travel trailer that they haul behind their truck when their 2 weeks are up at Featherly park.

“Some of us stay because we have to,” Penny Szlavikovics said about park campers. “We don’t have a house, my husband doesn’t make enough to get us into a house. Prices here are sky-high.”

The family, which includes three sons, lived in its own home in Costa Mesa for 27 years. When the husband was laid off in 1980, the family lost its home and moved to Riverside. But then another bad financial turn forced them out of that home and into the parks.

Now, Szlavikovics and the couple’s 20-year-old son, also named Joseph, both work, but they say that even with two salaries it is difficult to save enough to get into another house.

“The only apartments we could afford I wouldn’t want to live in,” Penny Szlavikovics said. “And where are you going to find a place that will take kids, and a dog?”

At Featherly, the fee of $10 a day--it went up from $8.50 in January--gets them access to running water at the camp sites, but no electrical hookups. The family runs its appliances on power from the truck’s battery.

On Saturday afternoon, Penny Szlavikovics was preparing to take the family laundry to a Laundromat several miles away because there are no facilities at the park.

Other housekeeping chores are different when you live in a park, Penny Szlavikovics said. She had placed a small piece of carpet on the ground outside the doorway to the trailer, but said the kids still track dust from the park into her trailer constantly.

The Szlavikovics’ other two children are 12 and 17. They do not go to school, but instead receive instruction from their mother.

“I don’t like living like this,” said the older Joseph Szlavikovics.

Szlavikovics considers himself a hard-working man, and says it is the “freeloaders” who come into the parks, not wanting to hold down a job, getting drunk and using drugs, who ruin it for everyone else.

“If these bad people start moving in, everybody has to move out,” he said.

Extra red tape in some ways makes the park a safer place for their children, the couple said. But too many rules hurt people such as themselves who need to stay at the park.

“If they would let you stay all the time (instead of making you leave after 15 days), you could save more money,” Penny Szlavikovics said.

The Szlavikovics say they realize that another part of the country might be cheaper for them than Orange County, where housing costs are very high. But they have roots here, they say.

“In Orange County, the cost of living is high, but somehow, it’s better here,” she said. “All my kids were born in Newport Beach.”

Another Featherly camper, Ray Newkird, 18, sat bare-chested in a lawn chair Saturday, soaking up the sun. He said he is unemployed now, but is looking for a job. He said he stays either at Featherly, or another park near Lake Elsinore, or with his girlfriend in Yorba Linda.

“Right now, it’s just a lot of getting away from the hassles of the rat race,” he said. “You can just come out here and watch the chipmunks run around.”

Ranger Bovee said that every Sunday, a coalition of churches gathers at the park to give away food and clothing to those in the area who might need it. But many families who live in the park, he said, will not approach the church people, nor will they approach a man known as “Brother Barnie” who comes through the park on Tuesdays and Thursdays giving away food.

“What is a homeless person?” he asked rhetorically. “Some people come here with just a sleeping bag. Some come with everything they had in their apartment. . . . They have jobs, some of them. I have people who are construction workers . . . this is just a convenient place for them to stay. I have another guy who comes in every 5 months. He has a job, he goes fishing.

“Sometimes we get kids who are runaways, and we do have people who are hard-core mental cases,” he said. “But the hard-core jerks, the people who will make trouble, I would say that is only 1% of the people who stay here.”

And, both rangers pointed out, there are also still many people who camp at the Orange County Parks because they enjoy the sporting life.

Mike and Anne Mayco, and his brother, Paul, and Paul’s wife Myrtle, all from Canada and retired, are making their way through the Southwestern United States in an RV. They stopped at O’Neill Park on Saturday just to spend the night.

Actually, the two retired couples meant to stop at an RV park but somehow made a wrong turn. O’Neill Park, they said, is much richer in natural attractions than in such amenities as the electricity and water hookups they are used to in parks that cater to RVs.

“We’re not exactly for hiking,” Mike Mayco said. “But one night of roughing it don’t hurt.”