Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday signed into law a Democrat-led bill poised to expand regulatory protections for residents across the state’s roughly 900 mobile home parks, a section of Colorado’s housing stock that communities have increasingly leaned on as affordability woes mount.
Flanked by the bill’s sponsors and local advocates at Broomfield city and county offices, Polis touted the bill as one that will be particularly resonant in Boulder County — where high-profile clashes between mobile home park owners and residents have in recent years lead to city council intervention — though one in which the effects will be felt in “mobile home parks across the state.”
The bill — House Bill 1309 — serves more or less as an enforcement for a series of original regulations outlined in the 1985 Mobile Home Parks Act that advocates argue have been neglected over the last several decades.
Void of such a mechanism, Rep. Edie Hooton, D-Boulder, one of the bill’s authors, suggests that thousands of violations by park owners have gone unresolved over the years as residents “have had no way to seek restitution.”
The new law provides for a dispute resolution process modeled after one used across Washington state, sponsors say, allowing the Department of Local Affairs’ Division of Housing to accept complaints from mobile home owners and mediate between them and park owners. A small fee, split between park and mobile home owners, would pay for the process, lawmakers say.
Advocates argue that some of the more common violations of the original act by park owners include gross overbilling for utilities, charging unexplained fees and retaliatory practices, to name a few.
Hooton said under the new system lawmakers expect to see a spike in complaints over the first year, though they believe they likely will taper off by the fourth year “as park owners start to see that the rules are being enforced.”
The bill has its critics. Rep. Terri Carver, R-Colorado Springs, told the Colorado Springs Gazette last month that the bill may burden mobile home park owners who are acting in good faith.
“I still don’t think it is helpful to create an oversight agency … that adds a lot of bureaucracy and delay in resolving disputes and investigating complaints, rather than keeping it local,” Carver said at the time.
Democratic lawmakers have tried more recently to push similar legislation through (though original efforts stretch back to the late 1980s), Hooton said, but a split leadership served to stunt the bills until now.
The law’s second component gives mobile home parks located across unincorporated county lands the same rights as those inside home rule communities; while mobile home parks within municipalities have their regulations dictated by local city councils, those on unincorporated county land were previously governed by state statute.
With hundreds of mobile homes across unincorporated Boulder County, Commissioner Deb Gardner said Thursday that local leaders have long fought to bring the communities into the fold so commissioners could begin enacting local regulations of their own. While no specific measures are on any immediate agendas, Gardner said any new rules likely would mirror those enacted by Boulder City Council in recent years.
In 2017, Boulder passed regulations aimed at combating the “power imbalance” between park and mobile home owners; the ordinance granted residents a “right to privacy” and “anti-retaliation” measures meant to limit the practice of park owners raising rents or handing out fines in response to residents organizing neighborhood representation.
Broomfield last year made similar tweaks to its regulations for mobile home parks after residents arrived en masse to council meetings decrying the practices of their corporate park owners.
“Homeowners across Boulder County have been working with county and city staff to address abuses and challenges that they regularly face in some of the county’s mobile home parks,” Gardner stated in a Thursday news release. “Now with the passage of HB19-1309, Colorado can enforce the Mobile Home Park Act, and statutory counties, like Boulder County, have the authority to enact and enforce local ordinances to address harms.”
The third component of the new law extends the period given to residents after eviction; before Thursday, mobile home residents were given just 48 hours to vacate their properties. The new law extends that period to 30 days.
Ginger Zukowski, a resident of Boulder’s Orchard Grove mobile home park — a neighborhood that made headlines earlier this year as homeowners were left without water for days after a pipe break — heralded the bill’s passing as a “triumph.”
“Not only did people get together and talk about their issues instead of cowering from them, they became activists and figured out how things work,” she said. “It helps to have a council that listens and a governor and representatives like Edie Hooton who are supportive.”
Moving forward Zukowski said she would ultimately like to see the ownership model revamped.
As it was, “we were almost in a feudal system.”