Mobile-Home Panel Is Made Permanent

After operating for three years as a temporary panel, the city’s Mobile Home Review Committee will become a permanent commission studying issues affecting mobile-home park owners and tenants.

“This gives a forum for owners and residents to discuss problems they’re having and find solutions,” Mayor Dave Sullivan said at Monday’s City Council session, when the change was approved.

The council also set bylaws for the new board, which will be made up of three mobile-home residents, three park owners or their representatives and three members at large. Commissioners will serve four-year terms and will be appointed by the council.

Mobile-home residents lobbied to have park owners themselves serve on the board, rather than owners’ representatives.

“Park owners wield a lot of influence, money and power,” said Don Caldwell, a mobile-home park resident who has served on the temporary panel.

“If they are able to bring in a paid consultant or professional management company to represent them on the board, they’re able to bring influences and resources that we as homeowners don’t have,” he said.

But Vickie Talley, executive director of the Manufactured Housing Educational Trust, said Tuesday that the council should allow representatives of park owners to sit on the board.

Owners often are not involved in the day-to-day park operations, she said, and many of them live out of the area.