Rent Panel Proposed for Mobile Homes

MOORPARK — With residents of a local mobile home park complaining that their rents are going through the roof, the Moorpark City Council may form a panel that would rule on future rent increases.

Residents of Moorpark’s Villa del Arroyo mobile home park filled a council meeting late Wednesday and recounted tales of steadily climbing rents and poor park maintenance. They urged the council to change a city ordinance that allows a park’s management raise rents at least 4% each year.

“Four percent interest doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s compounded, it adds up,” said resident Frank Hilton.

When Hilton and his wife moved into the park--located on Los Angeles Avenue near the Ronald Reagan Freeway--in 1988, they paid $302.79 per month, which included water, trash and sewage service. Now they shell out $439.60 and must pay for those services themselves.

“If we had to make a mortgage payment, too, we wouldn’t be able to do it,” he said.

Alarmed council members said the city should create a rent-review panel similar to one in Simi Valley, where several council members mediate rent disputes and hear park owners’ requests to raise rates.

Councilman John Wozniak said a panel could provide a flexibility that the ordinance now lacks. “There has to be a give-and-take in this, and I don’t think that’s there in the current ordinance,” he said.

Property manager Norma Johnson, who works for the management company Bessire & Casenhiser Inc., notified the council in a faxed letter that the company was not able to send a representative to the meeting. She wrote, however, that all increases in rent had complied with the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.

“We do not feel there is any need to review or revise the present ordinance at this time,” she wrote. Johnson could not be reached for comment late Thursday afternoon.

Rent increases at the mobile home park have caused friction between the council and the park’s owner in the past. Owner Dale Williams sued the city over the rent stabilization ordinance in 1989, causing the city to repeal it.

The city later reinstated the ordinance after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that rent-control ordinances do not constitute a physical taking of property.

Williams then launched a petition drive that brought the ordinance before Moorpark residents for a vote in a 1993 referendum. A clear majority of voters backed the ordinance.

Park residents said Thursday that they want park management to be required to justify rent increases rather than receive them automatically.

“They’ve been ripping off residents ever since [the city] passed this ordinance, because they automatically get that 4% without doing anything,” said tenant Alice Rowan.

Rowan, who has lived in the park for 18 years, said she would like to sell her home and move. But the rent increases, she said, are making the park unaffordable to prospective buyers.