Beaufort County, SC Homelessness & Encampment Rules: Encampment Sanitation (2026)

Adopted by Ord. No. 2022/12 on March 14, 2022, § 2-675 sits inside the Restricted Access division of Chapter 2, originally written to protect county buildings and the county detention centers from unauthorized entry. The prohibition covers seven listed activities on county government-owned land: camping or living-accommodation use, sleeping or preparing to sleep, storing belongings that support camping, building a campfire, erecting tents or camping structures, digging or breaking ground without written authorization, and cooking connected to camping. The ordinance is written broadly: it applies regardless of the participant's intent or the nature of other activities the participant may be engaged in, so a person cannot argue the activity was protest, recreation or shelter-seeking rather than camping.

The same division bars entry onto fenced or posted county land outside authorized hours under § 2-674 and restricts approach to the county's detention center grounds. Because the chapter reaches only property the county council owns lawful title to, it does not cover private land, state rights-of-way, or the incorporated municipalities of Beaufort, Port Royal, Bluffton or Hilton Head Island, each of which enforces its own trespass and camping rules. Enforcement falls to county law enforcement and the property's managing department; the division sets out no separate encampment-cleanup notice-and-storage procedure, so removal proceeds as a trespass and camping violation.