City putting mobile homes ‘on notice’

Sito Negron

Monday, May 3, 2004 | 11:30 a.m.

The fallout from Friday's closure of Sky-Vue Mobile Park will continue this week as former residents settle into new homes, health and safety inspectors expand their inquiries into other potential problem parks and officials look into the Sky-Vue owners' business practices.

Las Vegas officials say they plan to coordinate an inspection of other mobile home parks. They'll start with a Sky-Vue neighbor, Shady Acres, 1001 N. Main St., where workers were busy trimming trees and disposing of debris Thursday afternoon. By Sunday afternoon three Dumpsters were filled with trash near the front of the park.

"I just want to put all mobile homes in the city on notice -- (we're going to) start investigating," Orlando Sanchez, director of the Las Vegas Neighborhood Services Department, said.

Shady Acres is owned by Shady Acres LLC. According to the state's corporate information Web site, Denise and Steven Karp, who sold Sky-Vue to its current ownership group, are members of Shady Acres LLC.

They could not be found for comment Sunday, and Shady Acres Manager Cheryl Taylor refused to comment.

Lee Pizer, 63, a retired carpenter who has lived in Shady Acres for 20 years, said a group of government inspectors came through the park about two weeks ago.

"Since then they've been working on the plumbing and a little bit of everything," Pizer said.

He said the forced closure of Sky-Vue has him worried about what could happen at Shady Acres even though he thinks Shady Acres is in much better shape than Sky-Vue.

Rick Miller, a sign painter and 10-year Shady Acres resident, said upkeep of the two mobile home parks is very different.

"On a scale of one to 10 they'd be a two and we'd be a nine," Miller said.

Health District officials did not have information available Friday on complaints about Shady Acres, although a district car was parked at the park Thursday.

Jennifer Sizemore, Health District spokeswoman, said over the weekend that work on Shady Acres was "based on an inspection the Health District conducted." However, she said she did not have any information as to what type of work was required or what inspectors found.

In general, she said, the district has stepped up inspections of mobile home parks.

Further scrutiny

There are 132 parks counted by the state Division of Manufactured Housing in Southern Nevada. The state has two inspectors with the primary responsibility for inspecting the parks; however, it has focused its efforts on the homes themselves, not the condition of the parks' electrical or plumbing systems.

The state plans to look at two other parks owned by the Sky-Vue owners, Sandi and David DiMarco, starting today. Those parks, College Inn at 4615 E. Lake Mead Blvd. and Trailer Vegas at 3975 E. Lake Mead Blvd., also are under scrutiny by the Clark County Health District. Both are in Sunrise Manor township in unincorporated Clark County.

Both parks were purchased by the DiMarcos from companies in which Steven Karp had an interest, according to county records.

The Health District also is investigating Trailer Vegas and announced April 21 that it was fining David DiMarco $10,000 for illegally disposing of sewage in a trench running alongside the College Inn park.

In addition, those parks are being looked at by Clark County Social Services in light of the discovery Friday that apparently at least one rental voucher it had given for Sky-Vue residents in March had been used for a trailer that was empty.

Clark County Social Service Director Darryl Martin said Friday that the voucher was used for trailer 8, which according to city records and to the DiMarcos was empty.

Sandi DiMarco said Friday that the voucher may have been used for one of the trailers numbered in the 80s, but that no vouchers were used for trailer 8.

Martin said that his department is reviewing all vouchers released to the DiMarcos over the past year. He did not have the number of vouchers to be reviewed, but said that his records show 16 vouchers were used in the past three months. Each voucher was for $369.17.

"We're concerned anytime there is an allegation of fraud. The matter is under review by my office to confirm the facts surrounding this case. If that review finds Clark County was defrauded, the matter will be turned over to the district attorney for possible prosecution," Martin said.

Because of the investigation into the use of vouchers at DiMarco parks, residents of Sky-Vue were told they could not use county vouchers to move to College Inn or Trailer Vegas.

Other allegations

In addition to the county review of vouchers, the state's Division of Labor is looking into a complaint filed by Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas. She said in an earlier interview with the Sun that when she went to the park, "I met several (people) who were employees of the park. When I asked them how much they were paid or if they had a contract they said they didn't.

"They said sometimes they might get a cut off the rent, or they (the owners) might give them $20 at the end of the month ... They did not get minimum wage, there was no contract, no workers compensation, no payroll taxes, no making Social Security deposits."

She said some of the employees told her they were getting free rent in exchange for working as maintenance and security guards.

"The law says if you choose to give something of value, such as rent, it still has to be in a contract and it can't break down to 30 cents an hour," Giunchigliani said.

The issue of how to deal with Sky-Vue has touched upon multiple departments in multiple jurisdictions, and has brought to light gaps in the system meant to prevent housing from reaching such a state.

Different investigators looked only at pieces of the park, but nobody put together all the varied reports that could have provided the impetus for an earlier intervention that may have prevented the park shutdown.

Giunchigliani said she is working on a plan to better coordinate local, state and federal agencies that are concerned with the review of living conditions.

A new response

Sanchez said that the "Sky-Vue Mobile Park really opened our eyes to the way people were living and that's not right."

He said the situation revealed that the city needs to be more involved.

"Not to point fingers, but we thought the state (Division of) Manufactured Housing was taking care of these concerns," Sanchez said. "But we found out we had to make more of a coordinated effort with them and the health district and other agencies."

Renee Diamond, administrator of the Division of Manufactured Housing, said "the flaw in the system is who has to notify whom when somebody knows something about a park. There should be a statutory authority that any agency of enforcement needs to notify the state as well. I think that ultimately, a lot of us will get together and figure out what better can be done."

She said that there's no way to "legislate an owner not be an unscrupulous person ... but there is a way for us to work better together."

She said that her department gets 15 to 20 complaints a month in Southern Nevada. Most parks, she said, are well run.

"I'm not big on guilt by association," she said, in reference to whether the Sky-Vue situation shows a widespread problem.

The bottom line, she said, is that "we don't have enough affordable housing in a community that has so many low-wage workers. People make choices they don't want to make."

That was the sentiment of many Sky-Vue residents, who agreed their park was run-down but figured it was the best they could do.

Sun sets at Sky-Vue

Friday almost all the Sky-Vue residents had new housing, according to city workers who spent days developing a system that would help people find jobs and homes. On the last day that the park was open, city officials walked door to door, helping frantic residents move their belongings into moving vans.

Tommy Viola, a resident in space 41, was helping put a water pump in his neighbor's 1960 Ford 250 Camper Special.

"How come they can't give us more time?" he said, with about an hour to go until the city's 5 p.m. closure deadline Friday.

Many residents' confusion stemmed from events earlier in the week, when the city initially gave the 72-hour closure notice on Monday. However, on Tuesday a judge stopped the closure; then on Thursday the judge moved ahead with the 5 p.m. Friday deadline for residents to move.

The sequence of events left some residents thinking the place would stay open, and so many waited until the last minute to go through the city's "triage center," which helped place more than 70 households in temporary or new housing.

While no mobile homes were moved, state officials previously had inspected eight resident-owned homes and deemed six of them fit to move. Allen Talbott, the head of security at Sky-Vue, said trailer owners would be allowed to move their trailers out beginning today. Sky-Vue residents were issued special identification cards at the assistance center, and those cards were to grant them access to their trailers at the park over the weekend, so they could continue to collect and move their belongings.

Several former residents did return to the park Sunday to pick up their belongings, Talbott said. He said a couple of trailers were broken into Saturday night, but the thieves were chased away by security guards. He didn't know if anything was taken from the trailers.

A group of about 10 people who said they lived in Sky-Vue until Friday were in front of the park gates Sunday, saying they weren't sure where they would go, and that they didn't know about the city's offer of assistance.

Jenna Alford, 17, was sitting on a purple sleeping bag laid out on the sidewalk where she said she'd been sleeping since Friday night.

"They didn't give them enough time in the beginning to fix the problems," Alford said about city and Sky-Vue owners.

Lisa, a 25-year-old woman who would not give her last name, said that while the problems in the park were bad, the trailers were for the most part livable.

"But I don't know what they could have done, the city," Lisa said. "We were sitting out here last night all talking about it."

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