City Moves to Relocate Farm Workers : Oxnard: The council starts annexation proceedings for 21 acres near Olds Road. The site would replace a rundown trailer park.

Offering farm workers and their families hope of escape from a rundown and dangerous trailer camp, the Oxnard City Council agreed Tuesday to move forward with plans to relocate members of the cramped community to a new mobile home park.

Council members paved the way for the new development by starting annexation proceedings on 21 unincorporated acres near Olds Road and ordering city staff to figure out how to come up with the money to buy the land.

But in response to complaints by residents in the Olds Road area, the council also ordered staff members to look for other places to build a new trailer park.

Farm workers packed City Hall to urge the council to help them escape the crowded conditions at the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, a 140-trailer camp crammed onto five acres behind a Commercial Avenue industrial strip.

The farm workers listened through earphones as a man translated the proceedings from English to Spanish. Their children giggled and hollered, and sometimes ran loose in the council chambers.

“This sort of approximates life at the trailer park,” farm worker attorney Marco Antonio Abarca told council members, referring to the noisy chambers. “It’s crowded like this, there’s a lot of kids running around, and it’s always loud.”

Abarca told the council of the difficult life at the trailer camp, which has 1,100 residents. He said trailers are shared by two and three families who alone could not afford the rent.

The aging trailer park has existed for many years with numerous fire and safety violations, he said. He also said cars drive along narrow streets near children who have no other place to play.

“There is a level of overcrowding that rivals the worst slums of the Third World,” said Abarca, also with California Rural Legal Assistance. “I can honestly say the very worst housing in Ventura County exists in the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge.”

City staff had recommended relocating park residents to a new 150-unit park near Olds Road.

As proposed, park residents would form a nonprofit corporation to develop the site and, after 15 years, buy their own double-wide, three-bedroom coaches.

The estimated project price is $11 million, which would be financed through a combination of a state rental-housing construction loan, low-income tax credits and a tax-free municipal bond issue.

But homeowners in the area complained about being left out of the planning process. Some worried that a new mobile home park would crowd schools and drive down their property values.

“If you’re going to create these trailer parks, you’re going to create problems,” area resident Mel Harris said. “It’s going to just bring that whole area down.”

In response, Councilwoman Dorothy Maron shot back: “These people are living in hell. It’s awful the way they are living.”

The debate was lost on those who live in the old tin trailers.

“It has been years since we started talking about the living conditions and not a lot of attention has been paid to it,” said Luis Teran, president of the park’s tenants association. “The City Council has done some very beautiful things in the city, but they seem to have forgotten about those of us who live in poverty.”

Council members unanimously supported the proposal, but wanted to make sure that the new park is situated in the right place and would not develop its old problems.

“We’ve seen this situation for all these many years and it’s just deteriorating,” Mayor Nao Takasugi said. “Not only do we have the opportunity, I think it’s an obligation on the part of the city to improve the living conditions of the people at that park.”