More than a year after residents of a mobile home park in Soldotna sued their landlords over alleged insufficient utilities and illegal evictions, city council members have updated health and safety standards for residents.
Council member Jordan Chilson sponsored the ordinance. He’s invoked the lawsuit in explaining why the changes are necessary.
“What I’m concerned about is in the event that those close – and it’s likely a matter of when, not if,” he said. “ … My intent is that when that eventually happens, those tenants are treated fairly and given an opportunity to relocate.”
The owners of River Terrace told tenants in July last year that they’d need to move off the property by this past May. The eviction notices caught the park’s roughly 40 year-round residents, many of whom are low-income or seniors, by surprise.
In all, the Anchorage-based Northern Justice Project represented 19 River Terrace residents as part of the lawsuit. In February, the parties reached a confidential, out-of-court settlement. As part of that agreement, the lawyers wouldn’t disclose whether the planned evictions were moving forward.
Soldotna has two other mobile home parks that would be impacted by the changes.
The roughly 10-acre property sits in the project area of the city’s planning Riverfront Redevelopment Project. Both the landlords and the city say the evictions were unrelated to the project.
The ordinance does two major things.
First, it requires mobile park landlords to give their tenants at least one year’s notice if they plan to evict residents. That’s up from a 270-day minimum set in state law.
“So regardless of what time of year that notice were to be issued, a tenant would have an opportunity to work during the summer months to relocate their home,” he said.
Second, it requires mobile home park owners to certify their onsite water and sewer services are up to state standards. Mobile home parks that don’t use city utilities are regulated by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
The ordinance also cleans up sections of city code that address landscaping buffers around mobile home parks, as requested by planning and zoning commissioners.
The ordinance is effective immediately.
