Four residents of the homeless encampment along China Hat Road have filed a request with the U.S. District Court of Oregon seeking to halt the Forest Service’s impending closure of the area, scheduled for May 1.

The closure is scheduled as part of the Cabin Butte Vegetation Management Project, a 26,000-acre wildfire mitigation plan set to take place beginning May 1 in the Deschutes National Forest. If a temporary restraining order is not granted, homeless residents who remain in the area could face fines up to $5,000 and a year in prison. 

The lawsuit, which was filed in conjunction with two homelessness service providers on April 18, argues that if the area is closed it will cause irreparable harm to more than 100 people living along China Hat Road. It also argues that the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which oversees the U.S. Forest Service — failed to give a timely response to residents’ requests for reasonable accommodations on the basis of disability.

The complaint filed with the U.S. District Court of Oregon states the plaintiffs are seeking relief on behalf of the 76 other disabled China Hat Road residents, as well as 40 to 60 other unhoused persons living there who have not filed disability complaints. Some of the residents have lived there as long as eight years. The last time the Forest Service attempted to remove campers from the area, which technically has a two-week stay limit, was in 2022, but the effort was unsuccessful.

The encampment at China Hat Road sits at the center of a complex debate over homelessness in Deschutes County. Many homeowners in Central Oregon who live near encampments located on national forest land are concerned about  the increased wildfire risks created by encampments, but the rapid rise in Bend’s cost of living has created systemic pressures that leave many of its poorer residents without other options.

A Forest Service environmental report associated with the planned fire mitigation project shows 78 percent of fire ignitions in the area over the past 40 years have been human-related or due to an unknown cause. “The increase in human caused starts directly correlate with the increase of the long-term homeless population that resides within the project area,” the report says.

The environmental report goes on to acknowledge that “this proposal has the potential to disproportionately affect people experiencing homelessness,” and that “during implementation, there would be actions and outreach strategies to reduce impacts to affected populations, displaced homeless population and other forest user groups while minimizing impacts to the physical environment.”

The lawsuit says the Forest Service has not followed through on that promise, leaving homelessness advocacy groups scrambling after the agency announced the closure on January 16.

“After the issuance of the Jan. 16 notice, service providers, on their own initiative without any coordination or assistance from (the) Forest Service, began canvassing the homeless persons living within the project area about relocating. Severe winter conditions intermittently in February and March prevented those living on the land in the project area to even consider relocating,” the complaint states.

The request for an injunction against the Forest Service and its partner agencies does not request a stop to the Cabin Butte Project as a whole, but rather a temporary pause against displacing residents until an effort is made by the Forest Service to relocate the population along the lines promised in the project’s final environmental assessment.

An expedited hearing has been requested, but no additional information about the lawsuit is yet available in public court records as of Monday.