Team effort brightens mobile home park

Months of blight have come to an end: The charred shell of a trailer that sat vacant in Rose Haven Mobile Home Park is gone, the old appliances are in the trash, and the land is being cleaned.

The improvements are bringing some hope to residents like Georgia Collie, who lives at the mobile home park at Appleway Boulevard and Park Road.

“We try to make it nice, but it’s hard,” Collie said. “It’s kind of like it’s us against them.”

The “them” are many things at the park, which has struggled with crime, health hazards and a shoddy appearance for the past few years. But recent work is a step in the right direction, officials said.

“This is a perfect example of the way the system is supposed to work,” said Tom Scholtens, a Spokane Valley building official who worked with law enforcement and the city attorney to put the land owner – and mortgagor – on notice.

“We raised the level of concern to try to take care of those problems,” Scholtens said. “Frankly, those kind of problems aren’t tolerable for our citizens.”

Those problems have been going on for a few years, said Spokane Valley Police Chief Cal Walker. Sewage was gushing into the park in January. Police made several drug arrests in February, and a trailer that burned in November was left behind as an eyesore for neighbors and travelers on Park Road.

In June, a Spokesman-Review article revealed the property owner, Susan Daniell, had been difficult to reach and had allowed more than $114,000 in unpaid property taxes and sewer bills to pile up, which are still unpaid. Both city officials and a property management company said they would try to clean the park, but were unsure how or when.

The charred trailer was removed earlier this month, and Elite Properties, the company that is charged with maintaining and running the park, plans on continuing the cleanup.

“We’ll be going and cleaning up those vacant lots and then doing some overall freshening up to attract new people with nice trailers that can qualify to move in,” said Lori Peterson, owner of Elite Properties.

Her company has paid to have the property cleaned, which can be difficult when dealing with renters who are not paying on time.

Peterson said workers had to disassemble the burned trailer piece by piece to remove it. The charred limbs on a nearby tree have been trimmed. Empty refrigerators have been tossed, and now only some trash bags of insulation remain. Those will be taken away soon, Peterson said.

“It’s a slow process,” she said. “Things didn’t get that way overnight.”

Spokane Valley police have been working with the city’s building code and legal departments to clean things up, Walker said.

“We’ve seen a downturn in the numbers of incidents that we’re responding to,” Walker said. “I think we’ve taken a substantial step.”

In the past, law enforcement and code enforcement officials would not cooperate in cleaning up neighborhoods, Walker and Scholtens said.

“Different jurisdictions are supposed to work together to solve problems for citizens rather than get involved in a turf war,” Scholtens said.

Collie said it all comes down to neighbors watching out for neighbors in the park.

“It’s the people that live here that are making it better,” she said.