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News Flash: Exclusive to the OC Voice (up date Oct. 25)

HB Mobile Home Conversion Lawsuit Dismissed

By John Earl
OC Voice Editor
(Nov. 2007)

A lawsuit filed against the city of Huntington Beach by Mobile Home Park owners, contesting the city’s so-called mobile home park conversion ordinance (City Code Chapter 234.04.C), was dismissed by mutual agreement between the city and the plaintiffs on Oct. 4, 2007, according to Assistant City Attorney Scott Field.

(The story was first published exclusively by the OC Voice on its website Oct. 23).

The city’s precedent setting ordinance requires Mobile Home Park owners to provide relocation within a 20-mile radius to mobile home residents, who rent space in the parks, in the event they are required to vacate, or pay them the in-place value for their homes.

The lawsuit has been followed closely throughout the state by city governments, mobile home park residents and park owners alike.

Filed on June 14, 2006, the suit claims that the ordinance violates property and due process rights as well as the city’s charter and state law, by imposing unreasonable relocation costs on park owners and mandating the use of their property as mobile home parks in perpetuity.

A settlement over the lawsuit has been in the works for more than a month, Fields indicated. “They (the plaintiffs) agreed to dismiss it on Sept. 17 and the court actually entered the order of dismissal on Oct. 4,” Fields said. No conditions were placed on the dismissal, he said. “We’re just back to where we were. They could re-file the lawsuit if the wanted to,” he added, “but I don’t expect that they will.”

Attempts by the Voice to reach attorneys for the mobile home park owners who filed the lawsuit were unsuccessful as of press time, but Fields said the plaintiffs are still seeking to amend the ordinance. “Any amendment would have to go through the planning commission and to the city council, and that would all be preceded by public hearings” he explained.

When asked if the city council had indicated a willingness to amend the ordinance, Fields was adamant: “The city council cannot agree to anything, because you must go through the process for amending an ordinance. They did not and they cannot.”

Fields told the Voice that the dismissal agreement between the plaintiffs and the city is “tolled,” meaning that, in theory, the statute of limitations would be extended indefinitely in order to allow (corporate) mobile home park owners to file the lawsuit again.

But it has always been the city’s position that the statute of limitations had already run out anyway. “Giving them the opportunity to re-file the lawsuit isn’t really going to make any difference…If they re-file it, we’re going raise the same issue that the original lawsuit was not timely filed,” Fields explained.

Inexplicably, the lawsuit dismissal was not disclosed at the Oct. 15 city council meeting, when about 100 angry mobile home park residents showed up to protest the city council’s decision to negotiate an end to the lawsuit, fearful that any settlement would likely sacrifice the ordinance’s key protective features.

The previous city council, under former Mayor Dave Sullivan, had vowed to defend the ordinance. But at a September closed session of the city council, present Mayor Gill Coerper and councilmembers Keith Bohr, Cathy Green, Don Hansen and Joe Carchio voted to seek a settlement.

In Huntington Beach, where the median home price is $575,000, manufactured housing has long been the only option for elderly retirees, war veterans, and low-income families in the market for affordable homes.

How it started
The Mobile Home Conversion Ordinance, crafted by long-term Huntington Beach residents Steve Gullage and Robert Lupo, has been in place since 2004. Prior to the passing of this ordinance the only legal recourse standing between residents and park owners was a 1981 law that allowed for $500 in relocation costs and a maximum compensation of $4,700 for any home that could not be relocated. With a 4.7 percent annual depreciation rate, most long-term homeowners had little to look forward to were they to lose their site.

“Homeowners became concerned around 2002,” Gullage said in an e-mail to the Voice last year, “when homes were selling for over a $100,000, and they realized the financial loss that would occur with the current ordinance in place.”

So Gullage and Lupo went to work researching and drafting the ordinance. “I found many other cities had ordinances that gave ‘in place value’ as fair compensation and I obtained copies of those which I used as a basis for the ordinance I was drafting for the Huntington Beach people,” Gullage told the Voice.

The future
Reached by the Voice, Lupo, who said he had been informed of the lawsuit’s dismissal by City Attorney Jennifer McGrath on Oct. 22, indicated that he was cautiously optimistic that the conversion ordinance is here to stay. “I think it’s a done deal…and I think the only way it would change is if somebody came up the cash to amend the ordinance, and that probably wouldn’t take place for 4 or 5 years.”

Although mobile home owners will continue to have their investments protected, the city’s mobile home park conversion ordinance is also a good deal for the park owners, Lupo said. “If you offer security as an asset to the home owners it means people would then be willing to buy homes and will have confidence that their assets are protected,” he pointed out, adding that park owners can then raise their rents, which would still be cheaper than the cost of living in a regular home.

Nothing in the ordinance stops the park owners from selling their valuable beach property to developers, he added. “There are protocols [in the ordinance] that protect them as well.”

OC Voice staff writer Sara Ellis also contributed to this story.

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