Voters to Decide Mobile Home Rent Control Issue : Moorpark: If a city ordinance is upheld, the size of rent increases would be limited when the housing is sold.

Moorpark voters go to the polls today to decide the fate of a mobile home rent control ordinance that residents of the city’s largest mobile home park say is critical to their survival.

If the ordinance is upheld, the city would limit the size of rent increases that park owners could charge when mobile homes are sold. If it is defeated, park owners would be free to set the amount that new tenants would be charged.

“This is something that is completely essential for the people in this park,” said Frank Hilton, owner of one of the 240 units in the Villa del Arroyo Mobile Home Estates on Los Angeles Avenue.

Dale Williams, absentee owner of the park, hired a political consultant late last year to gather the signatures needed to force today’s vote deciding the fate of the rent control measure unanimously adopted by the City Council in October.

Rather than voluntarily rescinding the ordinance in response to the 1,507 valid signatures that Williams had gathered, the council decided to fight to preserve their action by putting the issue before the city’s voters. The special election will cost taxpayers about $23,000.

“It is not the city’s desire to regulate the amount of profit that the park owner is making, but merely to give the (mobile home) owners some relief,” Councilman Patrick Hunter said.

“The rates have been raised tremendously when those units change hands,” Hunter said. “It makes it very hard for a lot of the people who live in the park and are on fixed incomes. It makes it difficult for them to sell their homes.”

The difficulty of resale is the tenants’ primary argument in favor of vacancy control.

“We’re sitting here trying to fight for our existence,” said Les Baucum, president of the park’s homeowners association. “We’ve had people who have lost their jobs and would like to move. We have one lady here who lost her husband and she’d like to go live with her children, but she can’t just walk away from the thing.”

Baucum said he now pays $404 a month rent for the space his home occupies. If he were to sell his home now, without the benefit of vacancy control, he said the rent would immediately jump to $520 because of the change in ownership.

Williams has not returned repeated telephone calls in the months leading to the election.

Moorpark repealed its vacancy rent control ordinance three years ago, after a U. S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision held that such control amounted to a physical taking of a park owner’s property for which the owner was eligible for compensation.

Last year, ruling on a different case, the U. S. Supreme Court held that vacancy control does not result in a physical taking and that no such compensation is necessary. That decision led to Moorpark’s move to reinstitute the ordinance.

The local law would cap any rent increase at 5% or the Consumer Price Index--whichever is less--over any 12-month period and would allow just two such increases every five years. The city already regulates annual rent increases on units that are not sold.

In a bid to uphold vacancy rent control, residents of the Villa del Arroyo park took to the streets in recent weeks, posting signs, distributing flyers and sending letters to potential voters urging support.

“We’re getting great feedback from the people of Moorpark,” Baucum said.

Five polling places will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. to serve the city’s 12,987 registered voters, said Georgia Dennehey, an administrator with the county Elections Division.

Dennehey said 547 of the 722 absentee ballots issued for the election had been returned as of Monday morning. A 30% voter turnout would be considered very good, she said.