Trailer Park Tenants File Lawsuit Alleging Poor Living Conditions : Hawthorne: Complaint charges that the Imperial Trailer Park has violated numerous city and state health codes. Tenants ask for improvements.

Outside the Imperial Trailer Park in Hawthorne stands a rusty sign with missing letters.

Inside the park, exposed electrical wires lie entangled between trailers. In some places, the ground is damp--a condition tenants attribute to a constant overflow of the septic system--and an odor of sewage pervades the park.

Contending that they have put up with these and other substandard conditions for years, residents of the park have filed a civil lawsuit against the park’s owners, asking that improvements be made and punitive damages assessed.

The 32-page complaint, filed in Torrance Superior Court in September, charges that Sam and Vera Menlo and the Menlo Trust and Century Quality Management, which is owned by the Menlos, have violated many city and state health codes and have neglected their duties as landlords to make the park a livable and safe environment.

Reached by phone, Sam Menlo said he was not aware of the lawsuit and declined to comment.

However, the park’s resident manager, Harriet Vernon, said she calls repair workers whenever tenants report problems, and she placed the blame for some of the park’s deficiencies on the residents themselves.

Vernon, who has managed the park for seven years, said tenants sometimes “destroy the property” by attempting their own repairs and that they sometimes cause power failures because they “don’t have the proper facilities in their trailers.”

But tenants say problems at the park are not their fault. The suit alleges numerous health and safety problems, including repeated power failures, septic tank overflows, flooding in the laundry room, poor lighting, unsafe electrical wiring, leaking gas lines and inadequate trash removal.

Twenty-five of the families who live in the park’s 81 units are plaintiffs in the suit.

In interviews, tenants said they hope the lawsuit will bring improvements.

“I just want whatever is fair, whatever is right,” said Bruce Montgomery, 34, a gardener who has lived at the park for five years and pays $305 a month. “I stay here ‘cause the rent is cheap.”

Residents, who say they don’t make enough money to move elsewhere, say they are also angry because they have been told their rents will be increased by an average of $20 beginning this month.

“The money you pay is not worth it at all,” said Joseph Goff, 53, whose monthly rent is $410. “I would never think of raising a family here. Never. The owners have never done anything to improve the trailer park and make it a better place.”

The Menlos acquired the park at 3670 W. Imperial Highway in 1984, according to the suit, and residents say conditions in the park have been declining steadily.

In May, Southern California Edison completely cut off the park’s electrical power at the request of a city inspector who cited the park for health code violations. Some of the power was restored five days later. But it was not until two weeks later that electrical power was completely restored, and many residents say they had to rely on candles, kerosene lamps and flashlights in the interim.

Maria Colclasure, a park resident for four years, contacted KCBS-TV, which aired a story about the blackout. Sam Menlo later sent a contractor to fix the electrical problems, Colclasure said, but tenants held a meeting and decided to file the suit because other problems still had not been addressed.

Don Knechtel, director of Hawthorne’s Department of Building and Safety, said the trailer park has had electrical problems periodically over the years. Knechtel, who requested May’s power cutoff, said that when he inspected the park, he also noticed other health code violations.

He said the violations included placing too many trailer units in the park, limiting the amount of space between trailers; exposed electrical wires lying on the ground, posing hazards to any child playing nearby, and overflowing sewage from a septic system, resulting in odorous and unhealthy conditions.

According to the suit, Sam Menlo, whose assets include nursing homes, apartment buildings and hospitals, has a history of similar complaints against him in other business operations. In 1979, Menlo was cited for more than 2,000 health code violations at several Los Angeles nursing homes.

Knechtel, who said the park had not been previously cited for any violations, forwarded his findings last month to the state Department of Housing and Community Development for further inspection.

Kathie Parrish, a spokeswoman for the department, said the state’s inspector found 301 violations at the park, 190 of which were charged to the park’s owners. “The tenants themselves are responsible for 111 violations,” Parrish said. Some of those, she said, resulted from residents’ attempts to make repairs.

Both the park and the residents have until the end of this month to correct their violations, she said.

Gina Cobb, a four-year resident of the park, was cited for three violations: not having a specific type of electrical connection, clutter under her trailer and a burned electrical power box.

Cobb said the power box short-circuited when Menlo’s repair workers attempted to restore electricity during an outage. “It’s embarrassing to think they would come to cite us for things that are beyond our control,” Cobb said. “It’s adding insult to injury.”

Cobb said many of the cited tenants are upset and they plan to have a meeting to discuss these violations.

Joseph Sparks, who was cited for having combustible material in cardboard boxes and for having overgrown weeds around his trailer, said he thinks his citations were justified. However, he said he intends to correct the violations by the end of the month and that they have no bearing on the suit.