Oakland Park manager Greg Hammel is tired of the park being cast as the "big, bad bully" in disputes with residents of the manufactured homes park.

Saturday, October 07, 2000

Oakland Park manager Greg Hammel is tired of the park being cast as the "big, bad bully" in disputes with residents of the manufactured homes park.

"We came here with a plan to make this a better place," he said, explaining that Oakland Park Inc. purchased the trailer park from Leighton Nelson, who had started the park in the 1960s as Nelson’s Wheel Estates, in October 1998. "We thought it was an attractive community, but it needed work. We felt that with some work and clean up, it could be the finest residential park in this area."

Oakland Park is a nice looking park. The trailers and manufactured homes there are mostly in good condition and the streets and lawns are tidy. Hammel said part of the credit goes to the residents who maintain their lots, but assures one that the park management has done a lot of cleaning up since they took over in 1998.

"We inherited a lot of problems," the park manager explains. "In hindsight, there are many things we probably should have double-checked or looked into, but since the park had been here so long, we assumed the local and state laws would have been satisfied."

That assumption was wrong. The park’s storm shelter was not up to code and the rooms inside were filled with debris and old junk. There were existing zoning violations that the city and state later told Hammel he had less than a month to correct. There was debris and junk on the edge of the park near Interstate 90 – Oakland Park Inc. cleaned it up. There were existing sign permit violations for signs that had been in place for 30 years.

"The problems existed before," he said. "Why didn’t the state or the city tell Nelson to get things fixed? I’m not here to dump on the city or the state or Nelson, but people have been using those problems against us like it’s our fault. We inherited the problems and we took fixed them."

Part of what Hammel is referring when he says Oakland Park is being blamed for pre-existing problems to is a complaint filed in civil court by a group of 90-some residents in November of 1999, which alleged that the mobile home park owners had included unreasonable rules and regulations in their lease agreement. The residents also included in their complaint allegations concerning the park’s storm shelter, water drainage, rental charges, late and maintenance fees as well as retaliation by park management.

According to Hammel, the residents who filed the complaint represent 54 out of 150-plus homes in the park.

"People think the majority of park residents are on that complaint – that’s not true," the manager said. "We believe the majority of the people in the park support what we’re trying to do."

A motion by Oakland Park Inc.’s lawyer Jeffrey Kritzer for dismissal of the complaint was denied earlier this summer, but the complaint itself has not been settled. A second motion, this one by the residents’ lawyer Brandon Lawhead, is currently in the hands of a second judge. From there the case will either go to mediation or a jury trial. Nothing is known yet.

Hammel admits that the company has made some mistakes with the park: one of those was trying to get residents to sign the regular lease the company uses in Iowa. Some of the rules that are OK in Iowa are not legal in Minnesota, he discovered after residents objected.

"We took corrective action as soon as we found out," he said. "We hired a Minnesota lawyer to go through the lease and remove anything that wouldn’t work in this state, which is a much more regulated state than Iowa."

The park manager said he’s not asking people to accept intolerable conditions or not to complain, he’s just asking for a little patience and better communication as he goes about fixing the problems of the park. In the case of the storm shelter, he said, the park is in the process of constructing a shelter that will fit all the codes, but there were delays because of materials not coming in.

"We’re not a big vicious company that came here to destroy lives and take away rights," he said. "But the only way to make this community thrive is to look out for the best interests of the majority of its residents – that’s why we have certain rules and regulations. Because we know from experience what causes problems in a park and what doesn’t."