DANA POINT : Mobile Home Rent Control Study OKd

After a bitter debate among its members, the City Council this week appropriated $10,000 to pay a consultant to study rent control for two mobile home parks in the city.

The 3-2 council vote Tuesday night was the same as in two previous votes on mobile home rent control, with council members Eileen Krause and Mike Eggers dissenting.

The study is meant to provide direction to City Atty. Jerry Patterson, who has been asked to write an ordinance for mobile home rent control. Among the consultant’s duties will be to survey mobile home rents in Dana Point’s two trailer parks and check the availability of spaces.

The relationship between tenants and mobile home park owners has been tense in Dana Point since the city incorporated in January, 1989. Tenants from the parks have appeared before the City Council on several occasions to accuse owners of unjustifiably increasing rents.

The most recent complaint came last summer, when tenants of Beachwood Mobile Home Park in Doheny Village were hit with a 21% rent increase. The council majority agreed that the increase was unreasonable. After the two sides could not agree, the council reluctantly began studying a rent control ordinance in nearby San Juan Capistrano.

Patterson suggested that an outside consultant, rather than city staff, perform the study, to eliminate any conflict-of-interest potential. City Manager William O. Talley’s wife works for a mobile home park owners’ group.

Tuesday’s discussion on appropriating the $10,000 cost of the study quickly became a debate on the merits of rent control, despite Mayor Bill Bamattre’s attempts to focus on the study.

Krause, who has declared in the past that she is against rent control in principle, called spending $10,000 on the study “ludicrous.”

“I just can’t justify spending $10,000 for a study that would impact so few people,” Krause said.

While Krause’s comments were echoed by several speakers in the audience, council members Judy Curreri, Karen Lloreda and Bamattre were not swayed.

“I’m a strong property-rights person, but we’re talking about two property owners in these cases, one who owns the (mobile home) and one who owns the land,” Lloreda said after the meeting.

Park owners, she said, “are not subject to free-market pressures like the rest of the people are. In most places, rents are going down in Dana Point . . . but (in Beachwood), this is gouging in the truest sense of the word.”