Council Vows to Seek Low-Cost Homes : Oxnard: Confronted by angry residents, the panel revised its exclusive agreement with a developer who planned to build $90,000 homes.

Responding to angry claims of betrayal, Oxnard City Council members pledged Tuesday to do all they can to cut the price of new homes in a city-subsidized project so that trailer dwellers now packed into a tattered mobile-home park can afford to buy them.

Confronted by dozens of farm workers from the 50-year-old Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, council members said they have not forgotten a decade of city pledges to provide better homes for the 1,100 residents of one of the county’s densest, most hazardous slums.

“That’s the driving force behind this project,” Mayor Manuel Lopez assured a boisterous crowd of trailer park residents carrying placards blaring comments such as: “City Council, stop lying to us.”

Ending a three-hour hearing, the council changed an exclusive development agreement with northeast Oxnard landowner Donald T. Kojima to allow other developers to submit plans for less expensive types of housing to the City Council.

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Before the unanimous vote, a stream of speakers asked that the council do the right thing.

“We are the people who put food on your table,” trailer park resident Jorge Calderon said. “Many times, we have heard you have a site for us, but that’s your lies. It’s time for you to not only listen to us, but to do something about it.”

The Times reported Sunday that the City Council--after protracted negotiations marred by back-room council disputes--was poised to approve a project to build 115 homes that officials conceded that most trailer park dwellers could never afford.

City officials have discussed relocating park residents since a 1985 fire charred three trailers and left two dozen people homeless. An inspection in 1991 found 1,197 health and safety violations.

Under the agreement proposed Tuesday, Kojima would have sold 41 acres of farmland near St. John’s Regional Medical Center for $5.3 million--the bulk of it for the housing site and for a new school and park. Kojima would also have had first chance to submit a construction plan for council approval. The agreement went so far as to spell out how the city and Kojima would split some project profits.

No competition from other developers--including nonprofit ones--would have been considered had the council accepted Kojima’s plan for construction.

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Kojima had laid out in closed bargaining sessions his proposal for a community of 1,150-square-foot, three-bedroom manufactured homes to sell for about $90,000--an amount hard for mobile-home residents to repay, even with government subsidies.

Indeed, the council appeared ready to vote Tuesday on the purchase and development agreement as written until a dramatic, angry exchange essentially reopened the public hearing.

Councilman Andres Herrera had explained that the city had stopped considering the new project as relocation housing months ago because city hopes that the trailer park would close had not panned out. He acknowledged that many trailer dwellers would never qualify for homes in the new project.

“My heart is aching because I worked those fields,” Herrera said.

Then, turning his attention to farm worker representatives, he angrily scolded them for not doing more to make the relocation work.

“Why don’t you get your collective butts together,” the councilman said. “Why don’t you get off your collective butts and do your job for a change.”

The farm workers’ attorney, Eileen McCarthy of California Rural Legal Assistance, moved to the speakers’ lectern and loudly declared: “We have been shut out of the process.”

But for the next 45 minutes, she was not. In repeated exchanges with City Council members, she pressed them to delay approval of the agreement with Kojima so that other developers could submit projects more affordable for trailer residents. At first, council members did not seem to agree.

“We’ve had this project on the books for what, 13, 12 years?” Councilman Tom Holden said. “And we’re supposed to take three steps back. I’m dumbfounded. . . . Someone making $15,000 a year cannot afford to buy a house.”

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As discussions continued, trailer park owner Karen Guriel was also allowed to interject into the council’s deliberations. She said the city’s assertion that she had intended to close the trailer park--a key premise in the city’s move away from relocating park residents--was wrong.

“At no time did we ever say we were going to close the park,” she said. She argued for city relocation of her tenants so that she could move their aged trailers out and upgrade her facility with new trailers packed less densely than the present 28 per acre.

“If you will remove the tenants, . . . Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge will not look the way it does now,” she said. She pledged to spend $300,000 to replace its faulty electrical system.

Finally, with Lopez and Councilman Michael Plisky expressing strong interest in more development options, the council unanimously voted to change its agreement with Kojima so that it could consider other developers’ plans simultaneously.

“I would hope that we would not preclude anything,” Lopez said. “(I want) the least possible cost so it’s more in reach.”

Kojima said he was willing to consider developing any type of homes the council wants--mobile homes, condos or the single-family houses he proposed.

“We’re flexible,” he told the council.

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Rodney Fernandez, chief executive of Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., told the council that his low-income housing firm could provide a mix of rental and self-owned dwellings that the trailer residents could afford.

After the hearing, Kojima said he did not know how to react to changes in the tentative agreement. “Give me a day. I’m not sure what I have now,” he said.

But McCarthy, who had initially threatened the City Council with a federal investigation into improper expenditures of federal housing grants, said that the council had responded well and that her clients now have a better chance at new housing.

“I feel some progress was made,” she said. “At least there’s an opening here.”

But trailer park resident Consuelo Teran, 21, who has lived in the park nearly all her life, said she was not nearly as satisfied.

“I feel about the same,” she said. “Nothing changed. I don’t believe anything until I see it now.”