Tenants Say Mayor Ousted Them for Airing Complaints : Illinois: Official is a landlord in poor town of Alorton. Two families say they were evicted for talking to a reporter about living conditions, including holes in the floor large enough to swallow a child.

The mobile home where Pamela Taylor reared her two young children would be a candidate for condemnation in most U.S. cities.

A rug filled a huge hole that opens to the ground. Taylor feared the cracks in the kitchen linoleum would swallow her 1-year-old daughter, just as a break in the living room floor did recently.

“I keep salt right there to keep the snails out ‘cause my baby tries to eat them,” said Taylor, who is 24, single and jobless, as she pointed to gaps under the kitchen sink.

Taylor says her landlord, Callie Mobley, is a slumlord who evicted her for speaking with a reporter about the poor conditions.

The problem is, Mobley is also the mayor.

Residents of this poor southwestern Illinois town live among lots overrun by weeds, ramshackle houses and more than 200 rusty mobile homes, where the smell of burning garbage fills the air.

Having the mayor for a landlord, Taylor said, made it virtually impossible to appeal the eviction.

Taylor said she was turned away when she sought help from half a dozen state and local agencies, which said they had little or no say in the matter.

She did not even try to contact the six-member village board, which she says is nothing but a rubber stamp for the mayor.

Vernard Harris, who also was evicted by Mobley, agrees.

“She’s the boss out here,” said Harris.

The two were evicted last month within days of talking to the Belleville News-Democrat. Mobley says they were evicted for being habitually late on rent. Taylor and Harris admit falling behind, but offered to pay Mobley in full.

The tenants are planning to challenge the evictions in court as retaliatory.

Mobley says she did not evict two other tenants who spoke to the newspaper because they made regular payments.

One of them was Taylor’s neighbor, Monica Young, who told the newspaper she hadn’t had heat since December. The problem was fixed, but that doesn’t make Young a Mobley fan.

“She just don’t really do her job like she’s supposed to,” Young said. “You have to really beg or something, and I don’t like that, especially when I’m paying my money every month.”

Mobley rejects charges that she has failed to maintain the 19 or 20 trailers and more than 40 other properties she and her husband own, insisting that she has never been told of the problems. She insists that residents caused most of the damage.

“Alorton is a poor community, but my property is no worse than anybody else’s,” said Mobley, mayor since 1981. She was reelected in 1993.

The city requires houses to be inspected before people move in. Inspector L. T. Blanchard did not return telephone calls from the Associated Press and there are no inspection records.

Mobley said they may be among the village records seized in October by the FBI for an investigation the agency would not discuss.

Harris, his wife and their three children have rented a two-bedroom house for $300 a month from Mobley for about two years. The house is across the street from the Mobleys’ house, where a camper and a Cadillac are parked.

Harris said his 10-year-old daughter fell through a hole in the bathroom floor. It has been repaired, but the heat doesn’t work, and standing water under the house attracts bugs and rats, he said.

Mobley “knows these houses are really supposed to be condemned by right, but she controls the records,” he said.