Santa Maria has some squeaky wheels, let me tell you. I can hear them all the way from my birdcage across town. These squeaks are coming from a group of people advocating for the city to step in and adopt an ordinance preventing mobile home park owners from jacking up their rents in an unreasonable fashion. Well, this group has attended more than 27 Santa Maria City Council meetings to speak up at public comment.
For the record, we need to hear out the squeaks and squawks from the community; these are the people our elected civil servants are serving. So, have the squeaky wheels gotten the grease they want?
Not quite. Well, sort of. At least there’s an “alleyway” being created, if you ask Councilmember Gloria Soto. There’s also a “broader avenue” to look at, as Councilmember Mike Cordero said. They were among the three who voted in favor or reexamining the city’s enforceable model lease for mobile homes, which is optional for mobile home park owners to use when setting their rent increases.
Mayor Alice Patino said she’s “not interested in looking at the model lease at all.” Maybe she’d be interested in rent control on a broader scale, she said.
There were no maybes in Councilmember Etta Waterfield’s comments during the June 7 meeting. She was pretty fed up with the squeaky wheels and their spokesman, Gary Hall.
“A year and a half on this lease, we discussed this lease and we walked away with an agreement. A year later, you had your lawyer, representation, and something we agreed on. We sat at the same table, going on, and trying to figure out more—it will never be satisfied, ever. We don’t need government intrusion into private matters at all. Government is the problem—so many people rely on the government and that’s the problem.”
One might counter with Soto’s point of how it’s the job of local policy makers to go back and make change when things aren’t working. If people are showing up 27 times to advocate for a change, clearly there’s an issue!
Yet, on Waterfield went: “One thing that perturbed me at the last meeting was when someone said we want to be able to open the books of the property owners and determine what kind of profit they can make. That’s socialism right there, and there is no bloody way that I would agree on such a thing.”
Um. Wow. Socialism, huh? You’re going to play that card when discussing a measure that would prevent unrestricted rent increases from pricing fixed-income residents out of their homes?
Rancho Buena Vista mobile home park resident Frank Thompson spoke at the meeting, sharing that there needs to be a better balance between cost of living and income. Balance. Not socialism.
“When I first moved to the park, rent was a quarter of my income, now it’s half of my income. I feel that there has to be a slowdown or a stop to the amount of rent that is increased every year,” Thompson said.
That reasonable request got the 3-2 vote, even after Waterfield’s squawks. And now there will be some “community listening sessions” to see if this alleyway can be better paved for our persistent squeaky wheels.
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This article appears in Jun 16-23, 2022.
