Mobile Home Dwellers Tell of Power Play

Nearly 100 Orange County mobile home residents on Thursday told state lawmakers their utility service and bills are at the mercy of unregulated and sometimes unscrupulous property managers.

The testimony came during a state Senate hearing held in Garden Grove as legislators consider taking action to address a flood of complaints about shoddy utility service and overcharging at mobile home parks.

In one case, Shirley Huffman of Garden Grove said she went to Oklahoma for two months and had a neighbor flip off her circuit breakers. When she returned home, she said, she still was socked with electric and gas bills totaling $170.

Huffman paid, not knowing what else to do. “I’m helpless,” Huffman said Thursday.

The problem stems from how power and natural gas are supplied in most cases. Utilities sell power and gas to the mobile home parks, leaving it to the property managers to determine how much each resident used and how much each resident owes.

The system is ripe for abuse, residents testified.

Many mobile homes are equipped with individual meters, but residents complained that some park managers rarely check them--choosing to estimate usage instead.

But property managers testified at the hearing that many of the problems are due more to complicated utility billing cycles and occasional errors, not abuse.

Allan Alt, president of Synergised Properties Inc., a Beverly Hills company that manages mobile home parks, said problems are “aberrations.”

Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) called Thursday’s hearing, in part because of the impact California’s soaring energy bills could have on mobile home owners. The majority of the residents are on fixed incomes and concerned about rising rates as well as deeper problems in the mobile home industry.

Dunn and other state officials also expressed concern about the confusion mobile home owners experience when they try to file complaints or seek help.

Residents said they aren’t sure where to go: the power company, the city, the county, the property manager or the California Public Utilities Commission. Each agency often refers queries elsewhere, residents testified. Even state officials acknowledge the problem.

“What we need is clarity,” Kevin Coughlin, a program manager for the PUC, said at the hearing.

Dunn said he is considering filing legislation to address the complaints. Orange County has roughly 200 mobile home parks, and state officials estimate there are more than 5,000 in California.

“Somebody has got to take the bull by the horns,” Dunn said.

Huffman, the Garden Grove mobile home owner, accused property managers of simply not reading the individual meters of mobile homes, often just guessing at a resident’s power usage.

Others complained they’ve never received rebates for qualifying as low-income households or for qualifying under rebate programs for the medically needy.

Huffman’s neighbor, James English, said he finally thrashed through bureaucracy to get his 15% disability discount, but he has yet to see the credit on his bill.

“I got the rebate, but I didn’t. My meter is buried behind a jungle of brush, and when you get to it, it is so [corroded] you can’t read it,” he said. “So I think [property managers] just guess.”

During the hearings, representatives of the mobile home industry acknowledged problems in the way customers are billed and treated. But they said confusion about where residents can go for help causes more problems than unethical or unregulated property management practices.

“There is a certain amount of error” built into a confusing and complicated process of different billing cycles for parks and for their residents, said Mike Cirillo, a spokesman for Star Management, a Pacifica-based mobile home property management company.

But that testimony did nothing to temper criticism from residents Thursday.

In conventional houses you have resources, such as payment extensions from the utility companies, said Mary Ann Stein, vice president of the San Jose-based California Mobilehome Resource and Action Assn. In mobile home parks, that’s not an option, because utilities are part of the monthly bill, she said.

“If you don’t pay, you get evicted.”