Hagadone buys troubled RV park, displacing low-income residents

A run-down RV park and motel where residents complain about pools of raw sewage has a prominent new owner in Coeur d’Alene.

The Cedar Motel and RV Park sits next to Duane Hagadone’s 18-hole golf course on East Coeur d’Alene Lake Drive, and Hagadone Hospitality Co. recently purchased the 2.3-acre property, reportedly paying more than twice its market value.

Several dozen low-income people living there must leave by May 1. The buildings will be torn down and the deteriorating septic systems removed.

The shortage of low-income housing in Kootenai County has many of them worried about where they will go.

“I’m on disability. There’s a bunch of us on disability,” said Terry Raymond, 51, an Army veteran and former contractor whose neck and back problems limit his ability to work. “We don’t have the means to just move.”

The Cedar’s septic systems have repeatedly backed up among the trailers and campers parked under towering ponderosa pines, and city officials for years warned the owners to hook into the city’s sewer system.

The Panhandle Health District has responded to reports of septic backups at the Cedar four times since 2012, including an overflow earlier this week and one last summer, spokeswoman Melanie Collett said. The district’s environmental health specialists made sure any health hazards were resolved, including spreading quicklime on the ground to sanitize areas contaminated with sewage, Collett said.

Raymond said he has lived there for five years and has complained several times about sewage pooling next to the trailer he shares with his wife, Ronda. They also are angry about the previous owner’s decision last summer to close a shared bathroom, shower and laundry building in the RV park, forcing residents to share a single toilet and shower in one of the motel rooms.

“Nobody gives a crap about us,” Raymond said this week, “because we’re the lowlifes that live in the scumbag part of town.”

Ron Ayers, who sold the property to Hagadone in November, continues to operate the RV park and motel. Ayers said his company, Covered Bridge Income LLC, bought the property a little over five years ago – and inherited the problems with nine septic systems serving the RVs and motel rooms.

“The systems were not managed properly prior to my ownership, and much of the history and problems in the system were passed on to me in the sale, and were not disclosed to me,” he said.

Ayers said he has “actively located, mapped, exposed, pumped, repaired and managed the septic systems, and while they are old, are generally working properly.” But they’re vulnerable to blockage by foreign objects – “accidental, incidental and intentional,” he said.

Ayers added, “Reports of ‘50 people using one toilet’ are completely untrue, a fabrication by a disgruntled guest under an eviction notice.”

Raymond said he has worried about children and pets in the RV park being exposed to the sewage. “Our grandkids have moved out of there, partly because of the stuff that’s going on down there,” he said.

He was given a three-day eviction notice Saturday. “I told them I wasn’t going to pay any rent until they fixed it,” he said of the latest septic problems.

Purchase ‘about the mess’

Hagadone hasn’t revealed what he intends to do with the Cedar property, which is about 700 feet from the entrance to the Coeur d’Alene Resort Golf Course with its famous floating green. Jerry Jaeger, president and co-owner of Hagadone Hospitality, did not return a call seeking comment.

The resort and newspaper magnate grew tired of waiting for the Cedar site to be cleaned up, according to the real estate agent who brokered the sale of the property in November.

“Duane has tried to buy that three times,” said Dan Davis, with Property Research Inc.

The Cedar became eligible to connect to city services a decade ago when sewer was extended down the road to The Terraces, Hagadone’s lakeside luxury condominiums.

“The owner couldn’t do it, couldn’t get financed to do it. And the city can’t afford to do it, but they wouldn’t force anybody to do it,” Davis said. “Nine and a half years this blabbering has been going on. And the city couldn’t enforce that agreement?”

The city put Ayers on notice last year that the property must hook into the city sewer system, City Attorney Mike Gridley said.

“He’d been pushing off for a long time,” Gridley said. “We were increasing the pressure on him to get something done out there.”

Ayers told the city he was trying to sell the property, and city officials last fall got word Hagadone was buying it.

“And as part of that deal, the site would be leveled and there would be no human occupancy until it was hooked up to the city sanitary sewer system,” Gridley said. “And we said OK.”

County records show the total market value of the two adjoining tax lots is about $631,000, but the purchase price was about twice that, Davis indicated.

“Duane paid way too much money for the property,” he said. “It wasn’t about the price, it was about the mess.”

He said Hagadone also set aside over $100,000 as an incentive for Ayers to relocate the residents, some of whom have lived there for five years. The money is in an escrow account and will go to Ayers once everyone has been moved and the motel is torn down.

“Because (Hagadone) didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Davis said. “He wanted to help himself and the community, and get that cleaned up. It’s a freaking mess.”

Hagadone will pay even more to have the septic systems and drain fields excavated and removed, and refill the area with engineered soil that won’t leach, Davis said. “You got a ton of money to clean that up,” he said.

Hagadone also owns a parcel immediately south of the Cedar where another motel once stood. Just to the north of the Cedar Motel is a vacant lot owned by Coeur d’Alene Mayor Steve Widmyer.

“I think it’s a good thing that Hagadone bought that piece of property down there,” Widmyer said. “I had no idea that he was going to buy it. It’s a good thing for the whole area because if he bought it, he’s going to clean it up. … It’s an area that needs to be cleaned up, definitely.”

The mayor said he has no plans at this time for the lot he owns next door. “Right now, it’s just an investment,” he said.

Ayers said he doesn’t know what Hagadone intends to do with the land he sold him. “I am confident that the future of the Cedar property is in the right hands and its future quite bright,” he said.

Asked what he thinks will become of the Cedar site, Davis laughed and said, “It’s going to be a beautiful piece of green property.”

He added, “I think down the road, it’d probably be a high-rise apartment, a real nice one. In fact, it would really help the whole east end of Sherman if somebody would step up and build a real nice high-end apartment there. It would help the whole area to blend into the city.”

Alternative housing limited

Ayers said his company will lease, remain in control and operate the site through April 30.

He added, “All entities and guests of the property will be properly and legally noticed and relocated according to each of their unique and specific requirements, needs and choices.”

Moving will prove a real hardship for most of the people at the Cedar, Terry Raymond said. “Half the people don’t even have the means to move their trailer,” he said.

Jannette Pantle has lived in the Cedar RV Park for 19 months. She said she is buying her trailer from Ayers for about $9,000 under a two-year, rent-to-own contract. The trailer has black mold in it, the door doesn’t lock, and the heat and hot water don’t work, Pantle said.

“I am disappointed because I was living in a tent in the rain before,” she said. “I thought it would be an improvement.”

Pantle said she’ll be glad to get away from the Cedar. She’s on a waiting list to get placed in low-income housing managed by St. Vincent de Paul-North Idaho.

She may have a long wait. Demand for the agency’s 315 housing units already is high, Executive Director Jeff Conroy said.

“We have some properties that have five-year waiting lists,” he said.

“I don’t know where they’re going to go,” Conroy said of the Cedar’s residents. “There’s a major shortage not only of workforce housing, which is affordable housing, but low-income housing.”

Increasingly, people who work in Coeur d’Alene can’t afford to live in the city, he said. “If you’re making 8 bucks an hour, you cannot afford a $650, $700 single-bedroom apartment.”

The community is in desperate need of more funding to expand the inventory of low-income housing to shelter people such as the Cedar residents who are about to be displaced, he said.

“It’s federal funding that needs to come down to help support, to help ignite low-income housing,” Conroy said. “In fact, they’re cutting programs. It’s going the other way.

“We’re running all over Kootenai County trying to find houses that we can rent for $500, $550,” he said. “It’s really tough when you’ve got a family. So, we’re putting people up in hotels for short term; we’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got.”

Some of those who must move out are ex-convicts placed in the motel by the Idaho Bureau of Parole & Probation Services. Four men staying in the motel now are registered sex offenders, according to county records.

Ayers also owns the Garden Motel property – another cluster of low-income housing – along Northwest Boulevard. He plans to demolish the buildings there within the next two years and build a four-story hotel – a Fairfield Inn & Suites by Marriott – as well as a restaurant, bank building and large parking lot.

The City Council last month approved a zone change from residential to commercial for a vacant lot just east of the Garden Motel to allow Ayers’ proposal to move forward on a combined 4.5-acre site.

“Soon, at long last, both the Garden Motel property and the Cedar property will be well on the path to becoming something worthy of the potential held in each unique, highly visible and valuable site,” Ayers said.