Westminster : Turnout Expected for Hearing on Repeal of Rent Control Laws

Hundreds of mobile home residents are expected to turn out for Tuesday’s City Council meeting, when a hotly contested ordinance repealing the city’s mobile home rent control laws is scheduled for consideration a second and final time.

The council voted to suspend its own rules halfway through last week’s council meeting, then placed the ordinance on the agenda. The vote to repeal the existing ordinances was unanimous.

The council’s three newest members, Charles V. Smith, Frank Fry Jr. and Mayor Joy Neugebauer, campaigned against rent control in last November’s election. The council’s two veterans, Elden Gillespie and Mel Jay, also have long been vocal opponents of the city’s rent control ordinances.

“It should surprise no one that I am opposed to the rent control ordinances,” Neugebauer said. “That was a major element of my platform when I ran for the council.”

Representatives of the city’s 8,000 mobile home residents, however, say they didn’t expect the council to act on the issue until lawsuits filed by park owners challenging the ordinances have been settled. Rent control in Westminster’s mobile home parks has been the subject of litigation since 1981.

Besides doing away with rent control, the new ordinance would release impounded rent money from a trust account to the park owners. Those funds are estimated to be between $1.4 and $3 million, plus the interest they have generated.

In addition, residents--who since 1981 have refused to pay rent increases demanded by park owners and instead paid the smaller increases mandated by the rent control ordinances--would be required to pay owners the difference.

Since passage four years ago, Westminster’s mobile home park rent control laws have fended off 18 legal attacks on the question of constitutionality.

Many mobile home park residents expressed bitterness over the new ordinance and the way it was introduced. They noted that Neugebauer, Smith and Fry received the bulk of their campaign contributions from park owners.

“The council members were put in by the park owners,” said Dick Johnson, a resident of Los Alisos Mobile Home Estates, a sprawling 665-unit park on Garden Grove Boulevard. “They had obligations; their chips were called and now they’re paying off.”