Officials Call Trailer Park a Disaster In the Making : Oxnard: Funding is scarce to relocate 136 farm worker mobile homes from a hazardous, crowded site.

In the heart of Oxnard, just 15 blocks from City Hall, nearly 1,000 farm workers are crammed into a five-acre trailer park.

The 136 mobile homes, most of them more than 40 years old, sit side by side on 20-by-40-foot lots and average seven residents each, according to the latest census. Poorly built wood and tin additions fill out many of the lots.

Census figures show that Oxnard Mobile Home Lodge, in the 1300 block of Commercial Avenue, is one of Ventura County’s densest enclaves, and experts say it is among the most hazardous.

Cars and trucks drive by as children play on the narrow streets near trash bins and electrical boxes with exposed wiring. Gas leaks, power outages and water shortages are common, and residents say the 48-year-old utility lines are beyond repair. Fire- and code-enforcement officials call the park a disaster waiting to happen.

City officials say they want to relocate the camp but need an estimated $11 million to build a new park.

“It will take a tremendous infusion of funds from a variety of government sources to relocate the park,” said Oxnard Housing Director Sal Gonzales. “The city will put up one hell of an aggressive effort to raise the funds, but we don’t want to raise the residents’ hopes. In the best of cases, we’ll be able to get the relocation project under way in three years.”

But residents say three years is too much time, and accuse the city of diverting federal funds earmarked for helping the poor into ambitious development ventures.

On Tuesday, several residents attended a city budget hearing, hoping the council would channel at least part of its $2-million federal block grant into the trailer park’s relocation. The council opted instead to concentrate on other projects. Residents were not happy.

“Life here is very bad,” said Luis Teran, president of the Oxnard Mobile Home Lodge Residents Assn. “You can smell the leaking gas pipes almost every week. Electrical wiring is so bad that sparks come out of the power lines. Sometimes we go three, four, five days without utilities.

“We live in fear. There could be an explosion any day now.”

Fire officials say they are very concerned about the trailer park, especially the lack of spacing between the trailers and the narrowness of the fire lanes, which are often blocked by traffic.

“There was a fire there a number of years ago that left nine or 10 families homeless, because the fire leaped from one trailer to another,” said Oxnard Fire Marshal Terry McAnally.

“We started looking around and, geez, all the homes had these little additions,” he continued. “There were pipe deficiencies, wire deficiencies, our access was impeded by a number of vehicles. The place was really a shambles.”

Code enforcement at the park, which is home to both trailer owners and renters, is the responsibility of the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which has 20 inspectors for all of Southern California. The park was last inspected in 1987.

“I have no idea what the state of the park is right now,” said Jack Kerin, field operations manager for the code enforcement division. “Last time we were there, we found a large number of violations and most of the repairs were made, but in old trailer parks those repairs don’t last very long.”

City code inspectors said the park is beyond repair. “Basically, it has over-occupied its usefulness many, many years,” said code enforcement official Dick McIntosh.

The park has also suffered from neglect, McIntosh said. “I don’t know that there have been any significant repairs made to the homes since the park opened,” he said.

“There was a 10-foot (electrical) line that got repaired after it rotted several years ago, but the water, sewer and electrical systems have never been rehabilitated.”

Housing Director Gonzales said the city has been working to find new housing for the park’s residents since it became aware of the problems five years ago.

In 1987, a study was commissioned to determine the income and demographics of the park, Gonzales said. Last year, the city’s General Plan was amended to set aside a 57-acre site in south Oxnard for one or several mobile home parks.

Earlier this year, the city commissioned another study to determine how much it would cost to relocate the park, how big the new park would be and where the money would come from. The report is expected to be completed by the end of the month, but the next step--securing funds--may prove more difficult.

“Money is always the biggest problem,” said Martin Coren of McClellend and Coren, the Glendale consultant in charge of the project.

Gonzales said most of the money will have to come from outside the city. “There’s a chance that we might be able to get some money from the redevelopment budget, but the city’s general fund is completely out of the picture,” he said. “The city manager has asked us to be innovative because we have a fiscal deficit, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The farm workers who live in the trailer park can’t apply for city housing rehabilitation loans because they are scheduled for relocation. Nor can they receive funds from the federal farm worker housing budget because they live in a city and those funds can only be used in rural settings, Gonzales said.

The trailer owners--many of whom have been attending budget hearings for years to ask the City Council to set aside funds for their relocation--say the problem is not lack of money but misplaced priorities.

“I know the city grabs a lot of federal funds, but they spend it on businesses and $300,000 homes. The poor people get nothing,” said Elias Cervantes, 42, who lives in a trailer with his wife and two daughters.

In the last three years, the city has set aside just over $300,000 for economic development from its federal subsidy. This year, the City Council also set aside $200,000 from the federal block grant to rehabilitate downtown’s Plaza Park. Another $682,000 was earmarked for rehabilitation of moderate- and low-income homes.

For the Oxnard Mobile Home Lodge, the city set aside $14,000 of its $2-million federal subsidy to pay the administrative costs of searching for a new park.

Gonzales acknowledged that economic development projects are high on the City Council’s agenda. But even though the money doesn’t go directly into their hands, he said, such projects eventually benefit the poor.

“Economic development is extremely important to low-income people,” he said. “A large number of people work in strawberry fields, but the fields are dwindling. These people need to learn new skills in order to find jobs. Their children need to raise their educational level in order to find jobs, so they can afford better homes, so it’s all related.”

But many park residents fear they don’t have time to wait for the effects of the city’s investments to trickle down to them.

“I’ve been here for 15 years, and this place has not improved one bit,” said Antonia Ochoa, 42, as she watched her niece and a friend play in a patio about five feet wide. “Look around. Look at all the broken windows. Look at that,” she said, pointing to the exposed wires of an electrical box.

“Nobody can live like this. Something’s going to happen to the children.”