Mobile Home Tenants, Owners to Split City Fee

Mobile home owners and their landlords will now have to pay $2.28 a month to offset the city’s cost of managing a new rent-control ordinance.

The Ventura City Council voted unanimously Monday night to charge the fee, which should raise about $50,000 needed to help pay nearly half the $110,000 in annual legal and administrative expenses expected from overseeing the ordinance.

“It is a very complicated ordinance. It takes a lot of legal time and a lot of staff time,” said Budget Manager Mike Solomon. The amount of the fee will be reviewed in a year, he said.

The proposed fee was the last step in a drawn-out process designed to balance the scales for owners of mobile homes, who have pushed for stronger rent-control provisions.

In late January, the City Council approved a series of changes to the ordinance aimed at protecting mobile home residents from unreasonable rent increases, while leaving some flexibility to park owners to guard their investments.

Among its changes, the new ordinance extends the notification period from 60 to 90 days that park owners must give tenants before raising their rent, and prohibits park owners from requiring leases longer than 12 months.

The ordinance also allows landlords to charge tenants a proportional share of the interest costs on capital improvements to mobile home parks.

Neither mobile home owners nor park owners protested the fee Monday, saying they knew it would be necessary when the council approved broad changes to the law.

“When we made our first offer to the city last March . . . that was one of the provisions,” said Richard Schmittou, a member of the Mobile Home Owners’ Coordinating Council. “We are perfectly willing to pay our fair share.”

The $2.28 fee will be charged for each mobile home space and split between the owners of the city’s 11 mobile home parks and their tenants, who own the individual mobile homes.

Mobile home owners are required to pay their share of the fee to park owners each month along with their rent. Ultimately, park owners must pay the full fee to the city.

“The owners basically collect it and remit it to us,” Solomon explained.

Although it is calculated monthly, park owners are required to make a single annual payment on or before July 31 of each year, at the same time they renew their business licenses.

Although the fee will cost the owners of Lemonwood Mobile Home Park about $3,000 a year, they did not protest the added fee.

“I think everyone is well aware of what the administration of the rent-control ordinance costs the city,” said Bill Schweinfurth, who represents the Lemonwood Mobile Home Park owners.

“It was clearly part of what the city was considering,” he said.

Lemonwood management originally wanted the city’s mobile home owners to pay the entire fee, because the rent-control ordinance benefits them, Schweinfurth said.

But after a year of drawn-out and contentious negotiations, there was no sense in further opposing the fee, he said.

“We knew it was happening,” Schweinfurth said before the meeting. “It was all sort of part of a package. What is done is done.”