Tenants’ Negotiator States Demands

A negotiator for tenants at Haster Gardens fired off an angry letter to the mayor of Garden Grove on Wednesday, demanding that he take steps to prevent any cutoffs of utilities in the complex and publicly reveal his plans to help tenants relocate.

“This is a letter I should have sent weeks ago, but I was waiting for him [the mayor] to do the right thing,” said Tom Simon, who represents the tenants in a feud with their landlord.

In the letter, Simon also gives the city three days to:

* publicly announce plans to help relocate tenants whose apartments have been deemed uninhabitable by city inspectors;

* arrange for the lighting outside and in common areas to remain on;

* begin biweekly inspections of every unit to ensure they are livable; and

* arrange a meeting between a proposed receiver for the property and the tenants.

Mayor Bruce Broadwater said the city plans to name a receiver April 13, and the city is working to solve the tenants’ other problems.

“He has no right to demand anything,” Broadwater said of Simon’s letter. “We’re helping these people as best as we can.”

Equity Management 2000, the company that managed the complex for nearly six months, notified the city last week that it was abandoning the property because it had been made “the object of a smear campaign by politicians, opportunists, troublemakers, and nonpaying tenants.”

More than 60 tenants organized a rent strike last month to protest abysmal living conditions that prompted city inspectors to post 34 of the 148 units in the complex as uninhabitable for multiple violations of health and safety codes.