Valley mobile park has lost its rosy traits

There aren’t many roses in Rose Haven Mobile Home Park.

There’s plenty of trash, a few drug users and the charred skeleton of a mobile home that burned seven months ago.

And though a few gnarled roses still line the edge of Vickie Porter’s mobile home, the flowers bring little comfort to the woman whose windows look out at the charred hulk of a trailer that has sat, rotting, since she called to report the blaze in November.

“We’ve had to deal with this mess for months,” Porter said, walking around the mobile home and the blackened wood and trash that surround it. “It’s been a real pain for everyone.”

Thieves looking for quick cash have stripped the metal siding and skirting on the burned mobile home. Old refrigerators lean against its sides, and children seem to be attracted to the disaster.

“They come through here and scavenge around,” Porter said. “I think it’s pretty dangerous for the little kids. I try to watch the best I can.”

Porter, Spokane Valley and the property manager at the park agree that the mobile home must be removed. But when that will happen seems to be a mystery to all involved.

Less than a week after the November fire, Spokane Valley declared the mobile home a dangerous building and ordered it either removed or rehabilitated, said Carolbelle Branch, spokeswoman for the city. Soon after, officials from the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority requested an asbestos survey, which still has not happened.

The city has asked the owner of the mobile home park, Susan Daniell, to have the trailer removed. But the mobile home, even burned, still belongs to Rex Mason, according to the Spokane County assessor. The park owner is trying to contact Mason to have the mobile home moved, Branch said. Mason has no listed number in Spokane and could not be reached for this article.

In the midst of the confusion of landlord/tenant laws that apply to mobile homes, the city referred the case to its legal department, Branch said. The city has drawn up a voluntary compliance agreement to make sure that Daniell takes care of the mess. But a date is uncertain.

“When you’re dealing with this kind of thing, it doesn’t always happen as quickly as you would hope,” Branch said. “It’s one of those situations that sort of catches everything in the middle.”

The Spokane County assessor lists Daniell as having a post office box in Clackamas, Ore., though she does not have a phone number listed in that city. Attempts to reach Daniell for this article were unsuccessful.

It’s sometimes just as hard for the property manager, Elite Properties, LLC, to reach Daniell as well.

“She travels a lot. She’s always calling us from a different phone,” said Jana Hudson, an employee at Elite Properties, which has been working to establish control in the mobile home park, located at Park and Appleway.

According to the Spokane County treasurer, Daniell owes more than $61,000 in property taxes. Some have not been paid since 2003, and if the amounts for that year and 2004 are not paid by next year, the county will enter foreclosure proceedings on the property, said a worker at the treasurer’s office.

Also, Daniell owes more than $53,000 in sewer bills to the county, according to a spokeswoman for the county’s sewer department. In January, the sewer line backed up and spilled sewage throughout the park, causing a potential health hazard, said a spokeswoman for the Spokane Regional Health District.

When Elite Properties took over management of the park four months ago, they encountered several tenants who had no contracts to live on the property and some weren’t paying rent, Hudson said.

The company has had its hands full trying to get the park cleaned up, and it’s going to take a long time, Hudson said.

“We’re trying to get the yucky people out of there,” Hudson said.

The story of Rose Haven Mobile Park took a negative turn a few years ago, said Sgt. Dave Reagan, spokesman for Spokane Valley police.

“It used to be a very nice little mobile home park, very stable with very few calls for service,” Reagan said. “As the residents moved on, through one reason or another, we’ve got some bad elements in there. It’s very difficult for the remaining good neighbors to fight that bad element.”

In the past few years, officers have responded to vehicle thefts, drug-related crimes and identity thefts, Reagan said. In February, six mobile homes were raided, and several people were arrested on drug charges.

The park is in the Edgecliff neighborhood, which was one of the first communities to receive community-oriented policing funds in the mid-1980s. SCOPE volunteers continue to work on cleaning the neighborhood.

“When you have an absentee landlord, they don’t see the day-to-day decline, and they’re either unwilling or don’t care to address it,” Reagan said.

In the meantime, Elite Properties has hired a maintenance company to remove garbage in the park, and Hudson said they should get started within a week.

That will be good news to Porter, who recently saw a child fall into a large hole and cut his leg on a piece of rusty metal. After the drug busts and the improved care from the property manager, things have been looking better in the park.

But still, there’s the decaying mobile home across from Porter’s rosebushes.

“If you sit here and look out at it, it’s really bad,” she said. “It makes it difficult to even stay and live in the park.”