Residents told they’re ‘visitors’

Denise Cardinal

Thursday, March 12, 1998 | 10:25 a.m.

Bob Fewell wakes up to a sunrise overlooking Lake Mead almost every morning just as he has since 1969.

Soon, however, he'll be forced to wake up somewhere else -- anywhere else -- for at least half of the year.

The National Park Service is asking that Fewell and the other 200 mobile home residents of the Lakeshore Trailer Village stay in the park no more than 180 days a year.

That's because the mobile home village lies within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, a national park. And a Park Service policy states that only employees of the park can live full-time within park boundaries. About 1,000 residents of other trailer villages on the lake also are being asked to adhere to the 180-day rule.

In spite of these regulations, Fewell and several of his neighbors have lived in the Lakeshore Trailer Village for decades. To start arbitrarily enforcing the law now is nothing short of injustice, he said.

"We'll still have to pay rent for the whole year," he said. "Now all of a sudden this place isn't for permanent living? They're not calling us residents anymore. They're calling us visitors."

Karla Norris, concessions management specialist for the Park Service station in Boulder City, said that the leases Fewell and all of the other Lakeshore residents signed stated that their spaces were for "intermittent recreational use only." The Park Service didn't enforce the law sooner because of lack of manpower. Now, however, the department is getting pressure from Washington, D.C., to cut down on the number of residents.

"The infrastructure of this area is not designed for that (full-time) kind of use," Norris said. "It was built in the 1950s. It wasn't built for laundry to be done daily, or showers to be taken every day."

As an example, she said that one resident's air conditioning unit causes all the other homes on the same row in the mobile home park to lose power. Then there are other services that are required for residents, like emergency help. One ranger was even sent out to change a catheter, Norris said.

Even park employees are being asked by the government to live outside of the park if living facilities are nearby and accessible.

"The whole impetus of the national park system is to preserve and protect the resource and make it as available and accessible for as many people as possible," Norris said. "We need to keep it pristine, so we're trying to make as little impact as possible."

Norris contends the Park Service has been more than fair in its dealings with the residents of Lakeshore by giving them until March 31, 2003, to come into compliance.

The Park Service is holding a series of public meetings at 10 a.m. on Saturday at the different mobile home villages in the recreation area to discuss the policy.