The high cost of Maui housing and a preference by some to live outdoors will lead most of those camping illegally at Kanaha to move their campsites, possibly to the shoreline between Kahului Airport and Spreckelsville, said campers, nearly all of whom declined to give their names.

"We no like trouble. We goin' move," said a man who had been sleeping Monday in a tent in the shade of milo trees.

The current push by Maui County to move campers out of another public shoreline area is on a smaller scale than the county's project to clean up the Kahului breakwater area in late March and early April 2006. Then, workers with the departments of Public Works and Parks and Recreation used a backhoe and front-end loaders to haul out truckloads of trash and remove dozens of abandoned vehicles that had been part of a tent city of as many as 140 people.

As was done at the breakwater, notices of the Kanaha cleanup began going out to camp residents about a month ago, according to Lori Tsuhako, deputy director of the Department of Housing and Human Concerns and a leading member of the county's Homeless Response Team.

During visits to campers, county officials observed unsanitary conditions, including discarded food containers and a dead fish, Tsuhako said.

"It's not really the best of conditions to be living in," she said.

In March, outreach workers counted 83 homeless individuals in the Kanaha area, Tsuhako said. Officials went as early as 6 a.m. to deliver notices to campers so as to "catch people who are working before they leave," she said.

The cleanup, scheduled to begin at 6 a.m. Wednesday and run through part of Saturday, will cover a 300-yard section of the park from Ka'a Point, near a drainage channel, to an unpaved parking area on the Pa'ia side of the Kahului Wastewater Reclamation Facility, according to Tsuhako.

She said she didn't know how many homeless people at Kanaha already had heeded the county's directive to stop camping in the area illegally. A follow-up visit to campers found many of the same individuals who had been informed earlier of county plans to clear the park.

"We're hoping that by us having planned and talked to people that they would have found other places to go," Tsuhako said.

County employees who worked on the Kahului breakwater cleanup last year recalled that "campers didn't believe the cleanup was actually happening and waited to the last minute to move," she said.

Police will be on standby to help Wednesday, she said.

"It may be necessary to have them help us with the intervention," Tsuhako said. "But my hope is that that won't be necessary."

The county has been working with community agencies, such as Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Center and the Family Life Center, to provide the campers with housing alternatives or other services, including mental healthcare or substance abuse counseling, she said.

Makawao resident John Perry, a volunteer with the Community Work Day program, said he visits Kanaha daily and has put in thousands of hours to restore native plants and sand dunes in the area.

But that work gets undone when homeless people remove vegetation, flatten out sand dune areas and dig with rakes and shovels to modify the shoreline, he said.

"Most of them moved into the most sensitive part of the park," Perry said. "They don't just visit the area. They come in and settle down."

They also bring in derelict cars and leave trash inside the park, he said.

Some fishers refuse to go to Kanaha "because they fear for their safety," said Perry, who added that he has been subjected to threats and obscenities by homeless people.

Maui residents consider Kanaha "dirty," he said. "People cannot go in and just relax and enjoy the place."

Perry was critical of county officials for delaying the enforcement of rules against camping at the park.

"A lot of these people have been down there for quite a while," he said. "We just want the county to enforce the rules."

Few people were at the campsites Monday morning, although clothes, bedding, cooking utensils and other belongings indicated that their occupants intended to return from work or elsewhere. Piles of trash were stashed in some places, and some campsites carried the smell of urine and other human waste.

A woman, who declined to give her name, said she had been at the beach for about seven months. Before that, she had struggled to pay $500 a month to rent a no-frills studio apartment.

She said she enjoys the peace and openness of living at the beach and prefers camping there even though she could stay with family living in a residence in Kahului. The woman said the nearby county camp area requires people to pay a nominal fee for a permit and tear down camps every few days, which is inconvenient for long-term campers.

Rita Alana, 39, said she had been living at a Kanaha Beach campsite with a group of five other people, mostly relatives, for about a year, also primarily because of high housing prices. She said county officials had granted her a grace period because she had been keeping her campsite clean and well-maintained.

"We don't have to move just yet, but eventually we have to," Alana said, adding that she expected that her group would need to relocate in a couple of weeks.

Homeless people should be given land to erect a tent city, which could be landscaped and well-maintained, she said.

"These homeless people are not hopeless," Alana said. "We want all the homeless people to come out of the bushes. ... They're hiding in the bushes because of the cops."

Tsuhako said county officials have met with homeless people who've floated the idea of "creating their own community with their own rules of governance."

That suggestion hasn't gone anywhere, but the county is exploring acquiring parcels of land for an "eats-and-sheets" emergency housing facility, she said.

Sites have been looked at, but "land is hard to come by," she said, adding that such plans are in their infancy.