Mobile-Home Rent Control Issue Goes on Ballot : Housing: San Juan voters will decide whether to limit charges for vacated spaces in trailer parks. The election will cost the city $30,000.

A citywide special election to decide whether there should be rent controls on vacated mobile-home park spaces will be held April 13, the City Council decided this week.

The council vote Tuesday night was 4 to 1, with Gary L. Hausdorfer the dissenter. As part of the decision, the council also agreed that the city would pay the estimated $30,000 cost to hold the special election and write the ballot statement in support of rent controls.

“Everybody is hurting for money right now, and we have our responsibility to keep the city running also,” Councilwoman Collene Campbell said. “However, I believe when you stand up for something, you do it. I think it’s a good investment.”

But council members warned that the election could be a nasty one, pitting a group of mostly elderly mobile-home park tenants against a well-financed mobile-home park owners group.

“The tenants are in a David and Goliath situation,” Mayor Gil Jones said. “The owners are prepared and well-organized.”

The council decision pleased a standing-room-only crowd of mobile-home park tenants who have lobbied for rent controls on vacated spaces in the five parks that are owned by absentee landlords. The council responded Oct. 8 by amending the city’s unique 15-year-old mobile-home park rent control ordinance to cover vacated park spaces, only to have that part of the law be derailed by a successful petition drive paid for by the park owners.

“It’s a bad law because it enriches people leaving the city . . . and penalizes people moving into the city,” said William O. Talley, a San Juan Capistrano resident and former city manager of Anaheim, Mission Viejo and Dana Point. Talley, whose wife works for a mobile-home park owners’ group, argued that rent controls unfairly inflate mobile-home coach prices.

Because of the petition, the council was forced to either repeal the amendment or put it up to a citywide vote. With the backing of the tenants, the council chose the election.

Hausdorfer agreed that the matter should be put to a vote but suggested that it should be held during a general election in 1994, thereby saving the city the cost of an election.

“We don’t have (the money) in the budget,” Hausdorfer said.

But Jones, speaking for the majority, said the city should waste no time in deciding on an issue that is “polarizing” the community.

“I think we should get this on the ballot as soon as possible and get this behind us,” Jones said.