The day before a new team meets for the first time to tackle the vexing problem of homeless alcoholics, a group trudged through a stretch of soggy woods along the Chester Creek greenbelt to get an eyeful for themselves.

They snapped pictures on their iPhones. They gingerly stepped over piles of wadded-up toilet paper. They glanced inside soaked tents. They saw a man get arrested and a woman hauled away to the city sleep-off center for people who are dangerously drunk.

Not all the people checking out the homeless camps were part of Mayor Dan Sullivan's new Homeless Leadership Team, but some were.

The expedition Wednesday was organized by Ed O'Neill, a former owner of Brown Jug liquor stores and head of the Anchorage Responsible Beverage Retailers Association, an industry group that works to clean up the mess left at illegal camps and party spots. He said Anchorage's biggest concentration of homeless camps is along the Chester Creek greenbelt. He's been leading tours like this for years.

O'Neill is part of the new team, which is meeting today at City Hall. The meeting starts at 1:30 p.m. Leaders from social service agencies, Native groups, church groups, neighborhoods, the city, the state and other entities will try to figure out what they can do new to address a problem people have been working on for decades.

On Wednesday, maybe a couple dozen people gathered at the eastern edge of Valley of the Moon Park to follow O'Neill and police into the woods. Two TV crews. Assembly member Harriet Drummond and Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority CEO Jeff Jessee. The social services director from Bean's Cafe soup kitchen and the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska. Neighborhood residents and advocates for the homeless.

Members of an Anchorage police squad assigned to clean up the camps, among other things, helped lead the way. The first stop, a cluster of tents and tarps within sight of C Street, looked abandoned. One tent had an inch of water inside.

Anchorage police Sgt. Denny Allen posted a tent with an illegal camping notice that gave the owners 12 hours to clear out, an action he repeated a number of times Wednesday afternoon. A city ordinance passed in July directs police to do so. If the illegal campers don't move on their own, O'Neill's crews and community service workers will clear out their stuff, throwing away much of it. Some worry about what will happen to those whose tents and sleeping bags end up as trash.

At another cluster of tents, the police found a young man in wet socks and ripped pants. Officer Will Cameron asked him how long he'd been out there. He said about a month. He had been in the Alaska Military Youth Academy but then went to jail for a time, he said.

The officer asked the young man about his shoes. He said he lost track of them sometime the night before. He had a bloody, swollen ear. What happened? Did someone hit him? The young man said he didn't remember.

Cameron ran a check and discovered an outstanding warrant. He said he didn't know what for. He cuffed the young man and took him to jail.

The group trekked farther into the woods, past piles of garbage and empty bottles and too many tents to count. Coats hung on branches. A crutch lay in the leaves.

Many of the tents were on vacant property owned by a church, not city parkland, said Mark Butler, who lives nearby and passed out property ownership maps.

Police found a woman in a tent who seemed very drunk, slurring her words. They called for the Community Service Patrol van. She said she wouldn't come out with a TV camera running so the cameraman turned it away. She could barely stand. Officer Jennifer Haywood held her up and walked her out of the woods. Later, the officer said the woman claimed she wasn't that drunk but she blew over a .30 and was taken to sleep-off.

Allen, the sergeant, said when they clear out the camps, the homeless usually just move to another nearby spot. Some are from out of state, drawn here by the Permanent Fund dividend or hopes of a job, he said. Some are from villages. Some are mentally ill or brain-damaged.

"It's just a big revolving wheel. We'll clean them out of here, and we'll come back in a month and they'll be right back in here, just like they are now," Allen said.

The sergeant said he knows that approach isn't the best but said the city can't sanction illegal camping. The camps have dangerous elements, sexual assaults and fights, not to mention the lack of sanitation. He said he doesn't have the answers. If his squad keeps clearing out the camps, "where are you going to put them?"

He's hoping an experiment now being tried at Clitheroe Center to force hard core alcoholics into treatment will make a difference.

Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.

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