Mobile Home Park Rent Control Plan Softened : Ventura: The City Council angers residents by allowing park owners to charge limited rent increases if they agree to drop their lawsuits.

In a renewed effort to protect the city’s mobile home rent-control ordinance from potentially damaging litigation, the Ventura City Council has agreed to allow park owners to charge limited rent increases each time a new family moves into a park.

Under a new ordinance tentatively approved Monday despite bitter opposition by members of the city’s mobile home community, the city would allow park owners to charge an increase of $35 per month or 15%, whichever is more, every time a new tenant moves in.

In exchange, the park owners would have to agree not to file suits challenging Ventura’s mobile home park rent-control ordinance. The ordinance, which will receive a second reading next Monday for final approval, would expire in five years.

An overflow crowd of about 200 mobile home owners--almost all senior citizens on fixed incomes--packed the council chambers in a vain effort to talk the council out of entering the agreement. Many of them sat on the floor or stood by the auditorium entrance door for hours, patiently waiting for their turns to speak.

When they did speak, most of them accused the council of betraying its constituents and its members’ personal beliefs by bowing to economic pressure and legal threats from the park owners.

“The rent-control ordinance was adopted in the name of justice and high principle; now it will be eliminated on the principle of high money,” said Richard Schmittou, chairman of the Ventura Mobile Homes Coordinating Council.

“The mobil park owners have successfully intimidated city officials,” Kenneth Van Orspel said.

“By intent or default the people are not being represented,” said Edmund Burnam, as the audience erupted in applause.

But despite residents’ pleas, the council voted 5 to 2 in favor of the ordinance, with Councilmen Jim Monahan and John McWherter casting the dissenting votes.

Their five somber-faced colleagues apologized to mobile home owners before the vote. “This is not one of the most pleasant tasks I have to face,” said Vice Mayor Don Villeneuve, echoing sentiments expressed by the four others who voted with him.

“I am in total sympathy with the mobile home community,” he said. “But under the advice of not only our lawyers but of some very expensive consultants, I have come to realize that there’s not much of a chance to defend the rent-control ordinance. I have to recognize my responsibility to provide the rest of the city with prudent protection.”

But the council’s sympathy was small consolation for the group that until recently had been widely viewed as the single most powerful voting bloc in the city.

Since 1979, the mobile home council--which represents more than 3,000 voters--has helped elect 17 of the 21 candidates it has backed for City Council seats. However, their four electoral defeats have come in recent years, and some politicians believe their power may be declining.

Monday’s vote was symbolic of what appears to be the group’s diminishing political clout: Although the two longtime council incumbents voted for them, all five first-term members did not.

As the mobile home owners stomped out of the council chambers amid murmurs and hisses, many promised that they would vote out of office the five council members who let them down.

Monahan, who stepped down from his seat to shake hands with the disgruntled homeowners, repeated to anyone who would listen, “Remember this in the next election.”

The council also voted 5 to 2 to sign the agreement with the mobile home park owners stipulated in the ordinance.

William Schweinfurth, who represented the park owners in what he described as “lengthy and complicated” negotiations with the city, told the council that 11 of the 12 rent-controlled parks in the city have signed the agreement.

The ordinance approved Monday is almost the same as one adopted by the council in December of last year. But by its own terms, that ordinance expired because the park owners failed to enter an agreement with the city within 60 days.

City Atty. Peter Bulens said the park owners agreed this week to essentially the same terms they had refused six months ago. “I guess they had more time to think about it,” he said.

Under Ventura’s rent control ordinance, which covers mobile home parks built before 1981, park owners can only charge increases based on housing cost increases, plus three-quarters of the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index.

This ordinance has been challenged twice by the lease owners of the Ventura Marina Mobile Home Park near Ventura Harbor--the one park whose owner turned down the agreement struck Monday. Both suits are pending, one in a state court and the other in federal court.

Bulens said the Ventura ordinance introduced Monday would not affect the lawsuits because the plaintiff did not sign the agreement.

“Obviously I don’t agree with what the other owners did,” said Marina Park leaseholder Norma Peterson, who sat in the first row during Monday’s meeting but did not address the council. “That’s why I’m suing the city.”

Peterson’s year-old lawsuits were filed after a 1986 U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision declaring that a rent-control ordinance in Santa Barbara similar to Ventura’s illegally benefited mobile home dwellers. The 9th Circuit has jurisdiction over California and all other states west of Wyoming.

U.S. District Judge Alex Kozinski ruled that the Santa Barbara law gave mobile home owners “a right to occupy their property in perpetuity while paying only a fraction of what it is worth in rent.”