No one can decide who should clean up an illegal dump in the Salinas River.

Last week, a lingering bad smell just south of Soledad reached a new level of gross. A commuter who regularly drives over the Highway 101 bridge that crosses the Salinas River called Soledad Public Works Director Don Wilcox to report a stench she described as a dead animal.

“She said she’d smelled it more than once,” Wilcox says. “I’ve heard multiple complaints of smells coming from under there.”

But the city limits stop just north of the riverbed, which is dry now. Wilcox advises callers with complaints about odors to call the County Health Department. But the complaints are no surprise: There’s an illegal dumping ground there, just south of the Soledad shopping center, where a dead-end street gives way to a path lined with trash.

On a recent walk of the area, children played with discarded rusty wheels at the top of the hill. Mattresses, fuel canisters, shopping carts and tires were strewn below.

Salinas River water, when it’s flowing, is managed by the County Water Resources Agency. But the river bed underneath is private property, part of a ranch owned by Hitchcock Children’s Trust and David & Susan Gill Family Trust. That leaves no public entity – not Caltrans, the county or the city of Soledad – claiming responsibility for the dump site.

“Property owners are responsible for their property,” Carl Holm, director of the Monterey County Resource Management Agency, writes by email. “We do not have authority to enter private property without permission. When we identify issues on private property, we will try to contact the owner and request that they address the issue.”

Colin Jones, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation, echoes that: “The river’s not ours. We just have the bridge that goes over it.”

Still, Jones says, Caltrans does keep up some fences and berms, and maintenance crews will go in later this month. “We do what we can every year to spruce it up and get it ready for winter,” he says.

It’s no surprise to these officials that the riverbed below the highway contains large, potentially hazardous litter, including household appliances. They say when the economy tanked, people started living in the brush under the bridge; others looked to avoid disposal fees.

David Gill, owner of Gills Onions, says he wasn’t aware of the dumping, but says he’ll examine the site. If it is on his side of the property line, he says he’ll remediate it: “As a landowner, I want to make sure my property is clean.”

But trash is the least of Soledad’s worries when it comes to seasonal flooding, considering predictions for an El Niño winter with heavy rains. “The wastewater treatment plant is a bigger concern than the garbage,” Mayor Fred Ledesma says.

In other words, while floodwaters could move the trash dump downriver, through Salinas and eventually to Monterey Bay, they also could restore the river to a size closer to its original width, flooding the sewage treatment plant and contaminating everything downstream.

“Our fear is that that river will revert to Mother Nature,” Ledesma says.

To minimize that risk, private property owners along the Salinas River are removing plants and natural debris, like fallen trees, that have built up over four dry years and could potentially block the flow of the river.