Monday, April 26, 2004 | 10:58 a.m.
Las Vegas officials today were to give notice to the remaining occupants of about 40 trailers at Sky-Vue Mobile Park that they have 72 hours to move out because the park is too unhealthy and dangerous to live in, Elaine Sanchez, spokeswoman for Mayor Oscar Goodman, said.
"We'll be providing the notice to the residents and the owners that we are closing Sky-Vue because it poses an imminent hazard," Sanchez said Friday.
To help the displaced residents, Sanchez said, the city will set up an assistance center down the street from the Sky-Vue, 15 W. Owens Ave. near Main Street in the heart of the city's "homeless row." The assistance center will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. today through Thursday, she said.
Las Vegas Neighborhood Services Director Orlando Sanchez said it's going to be "a triage center, (with ) 14 agencies ... to make it as easy on the residents as possible" to find a new place to live.
Elaine Sanchez said the center will include representatives from the Lied Animal Shelter, which has agreed to take in pets from Sky-Vue for free.
Orlando Sanchez said that city officials also will invite Nevada Legal Services personnel to go with them to Sky-Vue.
"These residents will have some legal recourse against the property owners," he said.
James J. Vilt, a lawyer for Nevada Legal Services, has been trying to ensure that the Sky-Vue residents' rights are protected. He said that in addition to looking at residents' recourse against the Sky-Vue ownership and management, he had been considering taking the city to court over the way it has handled the case. "But we're probably not going to do anything because technically the court has to rule for the city," he said.
"My concern is that the property interests of the residents need to be protected. Some of them own trailers and others have property interests related to their leases," and the city's actions could be infringing on those rights, he said.
Some of his objections to the way the city has handled Sky-Vue are similar to the objections of the property owners.
The conditions at Sky-Vue are bad, he said, but the city knew that months ago and "decided it was an emergency only after" the Las Vegas Sun launched an investigation and publicized the longstanding problems at the park.
"Suddenly city officials decided it required immediate closure and that the people who lived there had to move," Vilt said. "The city needs to make sure that it has a better, more methodical way to handle a case like this next time because there is going to be a next time."
A special City Council meeting is set for Wednesday afternoon to consider more court action against the park as a result of the owners' alleged failure to comply with a previous court order. That order called for numerous repairs at the park. One action the city may take is to ask a court to order the Sky-Vue owners to repay taxpayers for the costs of relocating the park's residents.
City taxpayers have already spent about more than $40,000 helping some of the Sky-Vue residents, officials said. That money was allocated by Clark County Social Services for temporary housing for 42 households on April 9, when the city went through Sky-Vue and offered people a chance to leave while repairs were supposed to be under way at the 100-trailer park.
Some of the Sky-Vue residents own their trailers, others are making payments and some are renting. Many, if not all, of the trailers cannot be moved because they are in such poor shape. But regardless of who owns the trailers, the owners of the park ultimately are resonsible for the conditions in the park, officials have said.
Authorities have been trying to force the owners to fix everything from leaking sewer pipes and faulty wiring to water improperly supplied through garden hoses, as well as a lack of fire hydrants.
"We're taking these next steps because Clark County Health District officials have gone to the Sky-Vue 11 days in a row and our fire department and Neighborhood Services personnel were there as recently as yesterday and none of the code violations that were the subject of the April 13 Municipal Court order had been remedied," Elaine Sanchez said Friday. Before the city took the Sky-Vue to court, the park owners had been under various orders from city, county and state regulatory agencies -- with the first order from the state dating back to Feb. 3 -- to repair the health and safety concerns at the park. In addition, Las Vegas is fining the DiMarcos, the family that owns the park, for operating without a business license since October.
The family's temporary license expired in October. Authorities kept it from being renewed because the DiMarcos had failed to install a fire hydrant and make other fire safety improvements ordered by the city.
Additionally, the Clark County Health District announced Wednesday that inquiries into another trailer park owned by David DiMarco led to a $10,000 fine. The district said he disposed of raw sewage in trenches behind trailers at his College Inn Trailer Park, 4615 E. Lake Mead Blvd.
In addition to College Inn, the DiMarcos have a stake in Trailer Vegas, 3975 E. Lake Mead Blvd.
Les Gaskell, a Sky-Vue resident for 13 years, said he has "watched it deteriorate. The owners are trying, but they need a little prick to really motivate them."
Gaskell blamed the park's problems on homeless people who enter the park from the Salvation Army center next door.
"This all starts with the city of Las Vegas shoving all the homeless to this part of the valley," Gaskell said. "The city did this and created a ghetto down here. The opposite side of the street, the North Las Vegas side, looks nice. Everything bad is on the side of the city of Las Vegas; the trash on the sidewalks, the homeless sleeping."
Las Vegas City Attorney Brad Jerbic didn't address that criticism, but he said the city's options at Sky-Vue were limited.
He said the city cannot take over the property and fix it up, but there are numerous city and state codes that allow officials to shut it down if it's a threat to people's health and safety.
"The No. 1 position for the city, of course, when you own something it's your responsibility to maintain it and keep it to code," said Jerbic. "To the extent the owners require assistance, I'm not aware they even asked us for assistance."
He said he was "just aware of what the various enforcement agencies told us, their belief this property fails to meet numerous provisions of state and local law relating to health and safety."
Sandi DiMarco said that she received a document from the health district confirming that the park owners were fixing problems, contrary to the report given to Las Vegas City Council Wednesday.
She sent a copy to the Sun. It's dated April 19, and states that in one trailer the sewer problems had been resolved.
Orlando Sanchez said he was at a meeting Tuesday where the DiMarcos claimed that the health district was satisfied with the progress of repairs.
'We met with the health district," Sanchez said. "Nothing has been done to their satisfaction. ... The owners are very irresponsible."
Sanchez said that the owners "give a little bit so they can think they're pulling the wool over our eyes; that's not going to work."
The DiMarcos also are facing a Nevada Division of Labor investigation into their hiring and pay practices. Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, visited the park at the request of a former constituent and said she talked to people who claimed they were Sky-Vue employees. She said they were not being paid, or if they were, it was with a reduction in the rent.
On Thursday Sandi DiMarco said she had only one employee at the park. Other people work for rent, she said.
When asked how much money she's put into the park since January, she said, "I don't know, lots. I would have to find out from bookkeeping."
DiMarco said the bookkeeping is handled out of New York.
"All they keep saying is I spend too much," DiMarco said.
She later said "we're putting in at least $2,000, $2,500 a month in supplies." When asked why she thought that was sufficient, given that she had estimated just the cost of installing the ordered fire hydrant line at tens of thousands, she said that "this last week it's been probably $15,000 for the plumbing and repairs."
DiMarco said when the park was built 50 years ago, holes were drilled into the sewer lines so that if they backed up, it would leak out into the ground instead of into the trailers.
"Half of what we've been doing is replacing all these lines that had holes in them even if there was no raw sewage," DiMarco said. "They don't allow that anymore. We didn't know it was no longer allowed."
She repeated what her husband, David DiMarco, has previously said, that city and health district inspectors had been to the park before and never pointed out the major problems now at issue. She said that shows that inspectors either didn't do their job before, or now are being overzealous.
She said she has records of past visits over the past two years, which add up to a stack about "eight inches thick. ... My file now is three inches thick(er) just from the (inspections in the) last couple of weeks."
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