Acworth, GA Homelessness & Encampment Rules: Encampment Sanitation (2026)

Section 54-3, adopted by Ord. No. 2005-02 and amended in 2021, defines "camp" to mean residing in or using a public street, sidewalk, or park for private accommodations, such as erecting tents or other temporary structures or objects providing shelters; sleeping in a single place for a substantial prolonged period; regularly cooking or preparing meals; or other similar activities. Subsection (b) then makes it unlawful to camp or to store personal property in any park, reaching every municipal park, public playground, public plaza, attraction, and monument the city owns, and explicitly extending to property leased to the city by the United States Corps of Engineers and operated as a city park, language written with Acworth's Lake Acworth and Lake Allatoona parkland specifically in mind, since much of that lakefront sits on Corps-owned land the city leases and manages.

"Storing personal property" is defined separately to mean leaving belongings such as bedrolls, cookware, sleeping bags, or backpacks unattended for a substantial prolonged length of time, a definition that reaches an encampment's gear even when no one is actively camping at the moment of inspection. Before anyone can be arrested under § 54-3, subsection (e) requires an officer to first give an oral or written warning to stop the conduct; only a person who ignores that warning is subject to arrest for camping. The section carries its own list of exceptions for medical emergencies, wheelchair users on sidewalks, festival and concert attendees, and people waiting in orderly lines, but those carve-outs are written into the public-street subsection, not the park-camping ban itself.