A lengthy saga between Marina mobile home residents
and park owners will likely reach its final chapter with the closing
words “to be continued.” After months of meetings, the Mobile Home Task
Force found little common ground between park owners who wanted a
long-term lease and homeowners who wanted a rent-stabilization
ordinance.
“We’ve met for five months and accomplished very
little,” said El Rancho Mobile Homes Park owner Marshall Reeves at an
early October City Council meeting. The task force will meet one last
time Wednesday, Oct. 14 (past the Weekly’s deadline).
Homeowner
representatives will request that all parks adopt a memorandum of
understanding that the owner of Lazy Wheel Mobile Home Park presented
to its residents. The issue will then return to City Council Oct. 20.
The
Lazy Wheel MOU calls for a 3 percent rent increase in January, with
flat rents for the next three years, says Ruben Garcia, vice president
of Waterhouse Management Corp. When homes change hands, rent increases
can’t exceed 5 percent or the highest rent in the park, Garcia says,
adding that pass-through costs for capital improvements have to be
approved by the majority of homeowners.
“We are satisfied with
that agreement for now,” says Cindy Virtue, president of the park’s
homeowner’s association. “Hopefully that will tide us over until we get
the city convinced that we need an ordinance.”
It’s been more
than two years since mobile home residents asked the council to adopt a
rent-control ordinance. After paying for two conflicting consultant
reports, the council formed the task force in April to create a truce.
Sharon
Attebury, president of the Cypress Square Mobile Homeowners
Association, says property owners proposed a 10-year lease with annual
rent increases aligned with the Consumer Price Index, plus steeper
increases for El Rancho and Marina Del Mar, which have lower rents. “We
didn’t ask what time the train was going to come everyday to run us
over,” Attebury says. “That’s not stability.”
The quest for a
uniform agreement for the city’s five mobile home parks fell apart last
month when Garcia and Reeves left the table to draft their own MOUs. “I
think we have received enough input in our meetings to address the
needs of our mobile home park,” Garcia says.
Task force members
say Reeves has been meeting with El Rancho residents one on one and
pitching a new rental agreement. Reeves could not be reached by the Weekly’s deadline.
While
there is support for Lazy Wheel’s agreement, it remains to be seen
whether the other park owners will adopt something similar. If they do,
the contentious tale will resume in 2014.
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