LAKE COUNTY ? Mobile home park owners have until Dec. 16 to decide whether they will voluntarily offer park dwellers a lease designed to provide rent stability in the unincorporated areas of the county.
The Mobile Home Task Force worked for two and a half years to develop the much-contended lease, which would allow annual rent increases based on the consumer price index (CPI). Mobile home owners who lease the land under their homes worried that without the lease a park owner could raise rent beyond many dwellers” abilities to pay.
“What”s going to happen is these elderly citizens are not going to be able to afford, number one, their heating during the winter or their medications,” Lake Village Estates Mobile Home Park resident Bobbie Rivas said.
Rivas said because she was the park”s previous manager, she knew many of its residents lived on a fixed income. She said there had been no maintenance for two years, and saw no justification for a recent 4-percent rent increase.
Task force member and mobile home park owner Maryanne McQueen said an allowable CPI-based rent increase was 4.2 percent when she looked it up last month.
McQueen contacted mobile home park owners in the county”s unincorporated areas to gage owners” willingness to voluntarily offer the lease. At a November meeting on the rent stability measure, Supervisor Anthony Farrington said he wanted to see 100 percent owner participation, or the board would consider making the lease mandatory.
“What I”ve determined from the letters we”ve been getting back is that fewer than 5 percent of the parks in Lake County don”t want to sign this. To me those are pretty good numbers,” Supervisor Rob Brown said.
McQueen said out of 75 owners contacted, 57 had responded, and out of those, 28 said they would offer the lease.
In other business, property owner Robert Affinito and his partners have six months to tear down two blighted hotels along Highway 20 in Lucerne after a unanimous vote by the Lake County Board of Supervisors Tuesday. His father, Dominic Affinito, had been before the board previously regarding his plans to develop a hotel in place of the existing Lucerne Motel and Lake Sands Resort.
“We will not be able to succeed in achieving our redevelopment goals in Lucerne unless we do something about these properties. These properties are keeping people from investing in the community,” Lake County Redevelopment Director Kelly Cox said.
The vacant hotels are in Supervisor Denise Rushing”s district. She said because the properties are an eyesore, draw rats and have other health and safety concerns, they are the most complained-about properties in Lucerne.
Robert Affinito said difficulty acquiring a loan, financial feasibility and parking were problems with developing the intended hotel on the properties.
The board voted unanimously to extend the demolition deadline six months, address immediate health and safety concerns in the buildings and strengthen the county”s building code to require owners to maintain vacant buildings.
Contact Tiffany Revelle at trevelle@record-bee.com, or call her directly at 263-5636 ext. 37.
