Friday, May 21, 2004 | 5:50 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
May 22 - 23, 2004
What: Meeting to discuss jurisdiction and other issues related to mobile home parks and other housing
When: 1 p.m. Tuesday
Where: Grant Sawyer State Office Building, Room 4412, 555 E. Washington Ave.
One recent day at Elm's Court, a man who gave his name as Brian stood in front of a pile of wires he was stripping down to the copper and defended his northeast Las Vegas trailer park.
"It's a good family place," he said, as children played with kites on the blacktop in front of a row of abandoned trailers. "Everybody is happy here."
Brian, who would not give his full name, blamed the condition of the abandoned trailers -- broken windows, cracked doors, sagging walls -- on homeless people, who he said sneak in to strip aluminum and anything else of value. Otherwise, he said, the park is not in bad shape.
But records from the Clark County Health District indicate otherwise. Those records show that sewer and water lines need to be repaired and identify 20 vacant trailers that need to be removed. In addition, the park isn't even listed on the state Division of Manufactured Housing's master list of mobile home parks in Clark County.
That points to the difficulty of dealing with mobile home parks in the Las Vegas Valley. There are more than 100 parks in the valley, most, by all accounts, in good, clean condition. But many have been neglected by owners, residents and the inspection system that is meant to uphold a basic standard for urban living conditions -- the plumbing cannot leak, water must be clean, electricity must run through proper wiring, and windows and doors cannot be barred, in case of fire.
Meanwhile, residents are hesitant to make waves because for many it's the best place they can afford, whether they rent or own. It's also home, a small self-sustained community.
Blaine Thomas, another Elm's Court resident, admitted the park, near the intersection of Cheyenne Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard North, is "a little rough, but everybody's cleaning it up. It's one family here. I walk the park a couple of times a day, and if I see an empty trailer that has been broken into, I tell the manager and he'll take care of it."
Trailer parks and mobile home communities fall under multiple jurisdictions, depending on their location. The state inspects the home installation, but not the utility connections. The utility connections -- and other health and safety factors such as interior wiring and plumbing, and park infrastructure such as fire hydrants, roads, sewer connections and electrical wiring -- fall under a fistful of local jurisdictions.
The fractured jurisdictions, combined with a lack of information sharing and a general philosophy of being "reactive," which means waiting for residents to call in with complaints, was blamed for the situation at Sky-Vue Mobile Park.
At Sky-Vue, just north of downtown at 15 W. Owens Ave., a review of public records by the Las Vegas Sun first revealed the gaps in the system. Intense publicity followed.
Once authorities put the pieces together -- the broken sewer connections, unclean water lines, frazzled electric wiring -- they first ordered immediate repairs. Then, convinced the repairs were not being made by the ownership group, which includes Tracy Del Fante and Sandi and David DiMarco, who also own two other mobile home parks, the city of Las Vegas shut the park down.
More than 100 people were displaced, and although many hope to return to the park, it's unclear whether the owners will ever fix it up enough for the city to allow it to reopen.
Those varied issues -- reactive enforcement, lack of information sharing, the need to ensure access to housing -- led Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, to call a meeting of health and safety and other government agencies Tuesday.
Sharing information
One of the major questions is how to share information that could be used to determine problems before they reach a crisis point.
"I'm not sure that oversight exists yet. That's part of the reason I called this task force together," Giunchigliani said. "It may be something as simple as a posting ... this person was here this day and noticed this. That's just a suggestion, but there should be a simple way of notifying everybody."
Renee Diamond, administrator of the Nevada Division of Manufactured Housing and a former state legislator, said "the flaw in the system is who has to notify who 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.
"Is there any way to legislate an owner and not be an unscrupulous person? No. But there is a way for us to work better together," Diamond said.
Joe Boteilho, public response manager for Clark County code enforcement, said, "In cases where various agencies are taking various responsibilities for enforcement, there isn't an agency that maintains a central file."
Giunchigliani's list of questions to be answered includes:
Assistant County Manager Virginia Valentine said that during a May 7 meeting at the county agencies from the city county and state discussed "identifying responsibility and regulatory or enforcement authority. And we discussed the kind of authority we might need."
She gave as one example the idea of changing business licensing requirements for mobile home park owners from a general license to a privilege license, which allows government agencies to do background investigations.
In the city of Las Vegas, Building Inspector Paul Wilkins said his 50 inspectors focus mainly on new construction. That compares with 10 code enforcement officers who have multiple tasks in addition to responding to complaints about existing buildings.
Jim Shadrick, a code enforcement officer for the city, said in Los Angeles, inspectors charge apartment complexes $10 per unit each year for an annual inspection, and suggested that such a system could help pay for increased scrutiny of existing buildings in Las Vegas.
Bob Varallo, president of the Nevada Manufactured Homeowners Association, said property owners ought to be held liable if the condition of their parks deteriorates so much that mobile home owners have to leave, as was the case at Sky-Vue.
He said that under current state law, if a mobile home park changes to another use, the owner must pay to move residents anywhere within a 50-mile radius.
"In this (Sky-Vue) case, the owner (was) forced by a government agency to close this park. It's unsafe, it's unhealthy, obviously they needed to close it," Varallo said.
Constructive eviction
Such a case is referred to "as a constructive eviction, and presently there is nothing in any statute that I'm aware of that provides for assistance" for residents, Varallo said. "What we're going to have to do is very shortly, and working with the owners, go in and make some legislative changes. Because if it can happen at Sky-Vue ..."
Varollo said that his organization represents about 2,000 households. He said that in Clark County mobile home parks range from about 25 spaces to "the largest one in the state ... Tropicana Palms, 532 spaces."
The Clark County assessor's Web site notes 31,922 manufactured homes in Clark County, which includes the cities of Mesquite and Laughlin, as of Dec. 6.
Marolyn Mann, executive director of the Manufactured Home Community Owners Association, said the group represents about 55 percent of park owners statewide. Mann said she was not personally familiar with the Sky-Vue situation, but followed the developments through television and newspaper reports.
"You got all these different people, the fire department, manufactured home division, and code enforcers, a lot of people involved and you wonder if the left hand was talking to the right hand," Mann said. "It's too bad they didn't all communicate."
She said "it seems like a lot of people, from city regulatory people, to owners and landlords and some of the residents, share in the closure." But, she said, "don't broad brush this whole thing and think all mobile parks are like that."
Renovations
At the Aloha, 500 Miller Avenue in North Las Vegas, several blocks northwest of Lake Mead and Interstate 15, Sandra Price said her Denver-based company, which bought the property in August, spent about $300,000 on such renovations as repaved roads, 58 new street lights, upgrades to the electrical panels that serve mobile homes, and landscaping.
"Las Vegas is a growing market. You're in need of affordable places to live and we think we do that well," Price said. "We can make communities."
She said that it's in everyone's best interest to make sure that mobile home parks are safe, clean places to live.
"We're filling a need for low-income housing, and it has to be a partnership (with government agencies)," Price said.
In several meetings attended by state, county and city officials recently to discuss the events at Sky-Vue, "We all agreed we're joined at the hip on these things, so I think communications have improved drastically, and a lot of relationships have been established and now we know each others' roles and how we'll play in the future," Las Vegas Neighborhood Services Director Orlando Sanchez said.
Las Vegas City Council agreed Wednesday to allow Sanchez to develop a policy, which the council will have to approve, on how to deal with such situations in the future.
Sanchez said the Sky-Vue operators, Sandi and David DiMarco, were able to play agencies against each other.
Consolidation
"One of the things the DiMarcos were saying (was) they got different requests from different agencies. We'll make sure we're all consolidated so we won't have this game the DiMarcos were playing," Sanchez said. "That no longer will be an excuse. We'll be concise with all owners on what to expect."
He contrasted the situation at Sky-Vue with Shady Acres, a block away from Sky-Vue at Main and Washington, where he said the owner is hiring licensed electricians and plumbers to fix problems with sewers and electrical wiring. The owners of Shady Acres, the Karps, previously had owned Sky-Vue.
"We've had no heartache dealing with them (Shady Acres)," Sanchez said.
The Shady Acres manager would not talk to the Sun, and asked reporters to leave the property Thursday.
Inspections
Sanchez said his inspector has been working with the health district and fire department as a team to inspect other parks. He said they've been to a handful so far.
City Inspector Shadrick said that 21 sewer leaks were fixed at Shady Acres by Thursday. Three units need to be cut apart on site and removed, and 21 must be towed out, he said.
The owner has agreed to fix up 10 mobile homes per week, Shadrick said, and it will take 17 weeks to repair the units.
"And the owner has agreed to repair any emergency stuff, like I had one today on the spot," Shadrick said last week. On one home, he said, he noticed unsafe electrical wiring "where everything you can do wrong with wiring they did." One portion of the rigged system used wires too small to handle the current, Shadrick said, and "I held the wire, and it was so hot I couldn't hold it."
Shadrick said there are about 20 mobile home parks in the city of Las Vegas, and "we intend on going to all of them. They just haven't been looked at in a long time. That is a fact. ...
"We're understaffed, and it's kind of a matter of when I can get there. Hopefully by the end of summer we'll have all these guys in line."
Thursday, he went to Willow Park, a small park of less than 20 spaces at 1610 Rancho Drive, with fire and health inspectors.
Owner Leanna Turner said "if something is wrong, I'll fix it." She estimated it would cost more than $200 per unit to make the required repairs on everything from capping sewer pipes to fixing wiring.
Turner said she's been in the park for 40 years. "Sometimes you need someone to bring stuff to your attention," she said. "Too bad it had to happen this way."
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