By Camas Frank | Source
(ED. NOTE – Randall Sears, pictured above, is Vice President of GSMOL Chapter 1317 at Rancho del Bordo.)
ATASCADERO – About a month after a group of speakers showed up at a regular meeting of the Atascadero City Council seeking relief from escalating costs they say break the spirit of their property agreements, residents from three of the City’s senior living mobile home parks met with Atascadero’s management team on May 22.
While the parks are privately owned and their, just under 400, spaces are leased out under the terms of agreements governed by California and federal law, the nominally mobile homes sitting there are more or less permanent constructs owned by residents.
Attempts to have reasonable discussions with absentee and corporate landlords have not borne fruit, said Karen Levenway, Secretary for the Rancho del Bordo Homeowners Association. She says residents aren’t allowed a direct contact telephone line for the actual depiction makers who’ve raised their rents by as much as 30 percent intervals.
There is redress under municipal jurisdiction, however, if the City of Atascadero were to adopt an RSO, or more technically, a Space Rental Stabilization Ordinance. RSO is an easier shorthand, along with CPI for Consumer Price index one of the indicators which 121 other California communities have adopted as a measure for what increases would be allowed as reasonable.
At their meeting with Atascadero City Manager Rachelle Rickard and a Deputy City Manager, two representatives each from the parks Rancho del Bordo, Villa Margarita, and Camino del Robles presented an information package on the 121 RSOs in the state, with special attention to those already inside San Luis Obispo County.
While Levenway said they found the City’s staffers well informed and prepared for the occasion, the group gave them a refresher on the wave of control measures that swept the County in the 1980s starting with Pismo Beach in 1981.
Morro Bay, Grover Beach and the City of San Luis Obispo followed suit by 1988 with the County of San Luis Obispo also placing controls on the more than 2,000 spaces in unincorporated communities.
“If the County can do it there’s no reason the City of Atascadero shouldn’t,” commented Levenway noting that City’s are usually more strictly regulated than unincorporated areas.
The model ordinance the group would like to see Atascadero act on is modeled not on a neighboring community but on the City of Marina, which enacted an RSO for their five mobile home parks in August 2011. With a total of 399 spaces, they’re a good analog for the City of Atascadero and are the most recent, with a cap of 100 percent CPI and 5 percent rate increases over two years.
While staff were precluded from making any promises at this juncture, the group noted they’d organized representing 75 percent of the spaces in the City and offered the contact information for two attorneys with experience in the field willing and able to discuss the information with the City’s contracted attorney.
Currently the Atascadero City Council has packed agendas scheduled for their meetings through September, the group was told, however, Levenway said progress inside of a calendar year would seem like a good outcome.
She hoped that the $300-$400 per month rental increases experienced by some residents would not jeopardize the original vision of mobile home facilities as affordable long-term living, especially for seniors, in the meantime.
City spokesperson Terrie Banish added after the meeting that it was much too early in any process to for any kind of scheduling, especially as the City had a great deal of due diligence to carry out in any event. Neither she added, did she want property owners and renters to get the wrong idea about what the City may, or may not, do, “it’s all very preliminary,” she said.
