ELECTIONS / SANTA PAULA : Mobile Home Park Owners Fight Measure : Rent control: The expensive campaign involves a mailer and a Los Angeles County campaign manager. Backers criticize the use of outsiders.

A ballot measure in Santa Paula that would tighten the city’s mobile home park rent-control law has triggered a high-spending campaign by park owners, who have threatened to again take the city to court if the measure passes.

Placed on the ballot by tenant activists, Measure P would change the city’s existing Mobilehome Rent Review Ordinance to eliminate rent hikes of up to 25% allowed when a coach is sold.

The ballot proposition would also limit the ability of park owners to pass along the costs of certain maintenance projects to their tenants, roll back rents to Dec. 31, 1991, levels and drop a clause that sets a minimum of 4% for annual rent increases.

Supporters say park residents are essentially captive tenants and need protection from rising rents because the small number of parks makes it difficult for them to move. Allowing park owners to increase rents when a coach sells has hurt the ability of tenants to sell their mobile homes, they charge.

“With the 25% increase, coaches are just not moving at all,” said Donna Nelson. A Measure P advocate, Nelson has been paying rent on two coaches since May, when she and her husband bought a friend’s coach and put their own up for sale.

“People say they like the coach, but aren’t willing to pay the higher rent,” said Nelson, adding that the current $329 monthly rent could rise to $411 under the existing ordinance.

Opponents, fueled by $47,500 in contributions from Santa Paula park owners and a statewide owners’ association, have called Measure P a special-interest law that would force the city to raise taxes to defend the measure in court if it is passed.

Calling themselves the Santa Paula Coalition Against New Taxes, opponents say provisions that would limit the repairs that parks can charge off to tenants would result in the deterioration of park roads and facilities.

“Measure P is a very, very onerous ordinance that would absolutely preclude us from making a profit,” said James Taylor, who owns the Santa Paula West Mobile Home Park. Taylor, who is still in litigation with the city over its existing ordinance, has decided to abandon his Santa Paula park by selling it to its tenants.

Park owners have emphasized the potential cost to the city to defend Measure P in court, citing the estimated $100,000 the city has spent to protect the current ordinance from Taylor’s lawsuit.

Slow coach sales are not the result of vacancy rent increases, but are simply a sign of a weak housing market, the opponents say.

But the opposition’s hiring of a Los Angeles County campaign manager, dependence on paid staff and the production of a slick, newspaper-type campaign mailer has infuriated Measure P’s backers.

The four-page mailer resembles a newspaper, with captioned photos of opponents and articles that attack the measure as bad for park tenants and the town’s taxpayers. Headlines, such as the front-page “Taxpayers In Revolt on P,” reinforce the message.

“I think the paper they’ve mailed out is trash, and the whole thing is untrue,” said Helen Currier, who heads United Mobile Home Owners Assn. of Santa Paula, the group that placed Measure P on the ballot.

But Currier conceded that by mailing out the so-called Santa Paula Sentinel to residents who may have known little about the issue, the opponents have placed her group on the defensive.

“They have built a bonfire and now we have to go around putting it out,” she said. “We have to spend time and money that we don’t have.”

Before publication of the opponents’ campaign mailer, Measure P backers had raised less than one-tenth the money that their opponents had, spending almost all of it on legal advice. Currier would not say how her group will respond to the mailer in the campaign’s final days.

Nelson, who responded to the newspaper mailer with a five-page flyer titled “The Big Lie,” predicted that the opponents’ well-funded campaign would backfire with the small town’s voters.

“The majority are really being turned off by this sudden media and telephone blitz,” she said. “The telephone pollers can’t even answer questions about Measure P, and the things they write are so far out they’ve lost their credibility.”

While most opposition to Measure P has been financed by park owners, some residents of the city’s oldest park--Anacapa Mobile Home Park--have objected to provisions that would end negotiated rent agreements.

The only one of the city’s seven parks not to have changed owners since it opened, Anacapa charges lower space rents than most parks, said park manager Jerry Wilson. The park has struck an agreement with its 80 tenants that freezes the park’s top rent at $220 until 1994, and limits annual increases to 4% for the remaining lots.

“Negotiations were good for both the owner and the residents,” Wilson said. “Both sides were happy.”

Seen from a statewide perspective, Measure P is one more salvo in the running feud over property rights between park owners and tenants--who are themselves property owners--that began decades ago.

Pressured by park tenants, many cities had adopted rent control ordinances for mobile home parks that limited annual rent increases and imposed vacancy controls to limit rent increases when a coach is sold.

The battle began to heat up in 1986 with a federal appellate court ruling that Santa Barbara had violated the rights of park owners by allowing tenants to transfer lifetime leases. Park owners then initiated a string of lawsuits challenging mobile home rent laws throughout the state.

In the wake of the Hall vs. Santa Barbara case, many cities rescinded their existing ordinances or suspended vacancy controls to avoid costly and apparently unwinnable lawsuits.

But, earlier this year, the U. S. Supreme Court changed the legal picture when it upheld the mobile home rent control law of the city of Escondido that contains vacancy controls.

“The pendulum may have swung back to mobile home park tenants,” said Roger Picquet, an attorney who wrote the ballot analysis of Measure P for the city of Santa Paula.

In the months since the Escondido vs. Yee case, some cities have begun to reimpose vacancy controls, said Lucille Jones, the regional head of Golden State Mobile Home Owners League, a tenants’ advocacy group.

“Cities are putting controls back in quite fast,” Jones said, adding that 11 California cities have tightened their ordinances, but that Measure P would be the first ballot measure to do so. With the Supreme Court decision, Jones said that park tenants have exercised their political clout.

“Park owners have the money, but we have the votes,” she said.

In Santa Paula, the estimated 1,000 park tenants “are the closest thing to a voting bloc we have,” Councilman Les Maland said.

Four years ago, Maland pushed for the current 25% vacancy rent cap, overriding the concerns of the city’s legal advisers who feared litigation. Maland, who has remained neutral on Measure P, said the measure’s opponents may have miscalculated in using the provocative newspaper-like mailer.

Nelson made the same point. “We Santa Paulans are a tightknit community and tend to take care of our own, especially when somebody comes muscling in from the outside like this,” she said.

FYI

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