Three Sterling streets end at the river, and the neighbors have had enough

Three Sterling streets dead-end at the Kenai River, and the people who live at the end of them say the public shows up, uses their yards as a bathroom, and sometimes will not leave.

One property owner told the Kenai Peninsula Borough that people were "defecating and urinating right in front of his grandchildren, right on his property," Commissioner Kurt Wilcox said, relaying the borough's report to the Kenai Planning and Zoning Commission on Wednesday. The complaints also include trespass and at least one armed confrontation.

The easements are real and they are public. Borough mapping shows all three, and that settles it.

"You can't change public access," Wilcox said. "So ultimately there wasn't anything that we could really do to restrict access, but we weren't necessarily going to expand it."

What the borough can do is manage the place. Its planning director has proposed sitting down with the Bureau of Land Management and the state Department of Natural Resources, and has floated signage and an outhouse.