Two attorneys. Seven witnesses. Eight hours of cross examination. Those with stakes in a recent arbitration hearing’s outcome will probably not hear Santa Barbara County’s verdict on a rent dispute between an Orcutt mobile home park’s ownership and residents until April.
One consolation for attendees of the Jan. 21 proceeding was the arbitrator’s closing commentary, heard around 5:30 p.m. While a handful of audience members trickled in and out throughout the day, at least a dozen had kept their seats since 9 a.m.
“Anything I do say today is going to be a tentative view,” arbitrator John Derrick said via Zoom, shared on multiple screens inside Santa Maria’s Betteravia Government Center, where the county Board of Supervisors regularly meets.
“I am concerned with potentially allowing hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees to be an operating expense, to be passed on to the tenants,” the arbitrator said.
Derrick was referring to a table of operating expenses Harmony Communities, Del Cielo’s property manager, used to calculate a $39 monthly rent increase—initially set to be implemented this year—for residents of Del Cielo Mobile Estates, a 55-and-over community in Orcutt with about 180 units.
Among the listed operating expenses were legal fees from 2025 tied to Del Cielo owners’ ongoing lawsuit against Santa Barbara County for adopting a senior overlay zoning ordinance, intended to protect the community from being converted into an all-ages park.
Tasked with weighing the proposed $39 rent increase against standards laid out in a much older county ordinance on mobile home rent control, Derrick was hesitant to agree with Harmony Communities’ classification of fees related to the lawsuit as operating expenses.
“On the legal fees, I’ll share with you that I am concerned with the potential implication of allowing that as an operating expense because this could lead to monumental increases going forward,” Derrick said. “There’s surely a difference conceptually between, … a detainer action for an eviction, on one hand, which is intrinsic to the operation of a park, versus a lawsuit about what type of park this should be, which has to do with increasing the value of the asset to the owners.”
Earlier in the hearing, Derrick questioned accountant Brian Eid, one of Harmony Communities’ witnesses who testified during the hearing and presented the property management company’s expense report, if the tenants of Del Cielo residents should be “on the hook” for a lawsuit—between Del Cielo’s owners and the county—they are not active parties in.
“Is it an operating cost of the park, or is it an operating cost of the entity that happens to own the park?” Derrick asked. “It’s a key point because the park is not a party in the lawsuit. The entity that owns the park is. In what way is the lawsuit an activity of the park?”
“It has come about as a result of operating the park,” Eid replied, “[to determine] whether it’s being operated as a senior or an all-age park.”
“So, if this litigation took on a life of its own and cost several hundred thousand dollars, are you saying that all of this could be passed on in future rent increases?” Derrick asked Eid. “Are you basically saying that, one way or another, management can reclaim all of its legal fees for litigating this issue with the county?”
Based on the company’s classification of legal fees as operating expenses, Eid said that Del Cielo’s owners could justify continuing to recoup those costs from rent increases, possibly “in more of a temporary rent increase, over some period of years.”
In his tentative comments, Derrick said he worried that the justification route would set a precedent that doesn’t align with Santa Barbara County’s current mobile home rent control rules, but he welcomed any objections from Del Cielo park owners’ attorney Jason Dilday in closing arguments, set for review in late February.
Sue DeWeese, 16-year resident of Del Cielo and president of the park’s residents association, echoed the arbitrator’s concerns in an interview with the Sun.
“That’s their battle. Why are we involved?” DeWeese said. “It’s not fair because we’re not even part of it. We didn’t go after the county.”
DeWeese and many Del Cielo residents have been at odds with Harmony since May 2024, when tenants were given a six-month notice of plans to convert Del Cielo into an all-ages community. Later that year, residents spoke up about the issue in front of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, which ultimately triggered the senior zoning overlay.
When property manager Harmony Communities notified Del Cielo residents of the $39 increase in October 2025, DeWeese said that she and other tenants teamed up to collect signatures—and donations toward anticipated attorney fees—and completed the paperwork needed to petition for a county arbitration.
“A lot of us seniors are on fixed incomes from 20 to 25 years ago,” said DeWeese, who worked toward petitioning against a separate $57 rent increase in 2025 but did not complete the arbitration application process within the county’s codified deadline.
According to DeWeese, the $57 add-on was partly based on an increase in property tax when Del Cielo park’s ownership changed in 2024. DeWeese has lived at the park since the early 2000s.
“We had never had an increase in this park, ever, except for the CPI rate,” said DeWeese, who currently pays $518 per month for rent. “When I moved here 16 years ago, it was only $351.”
Arbitrator Derrick will finalize his decision on the proposed rent increase in early April, Santa Barbara County Real Property Division Manager Cody Bowden told the Sun via email.
“Either party may petition to the Board of Supervisors at that point,” Bowden said.
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com
This article appears in January 29 – February 5, 2026.