ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : New Lease Needed on Free Speech

The 265 residents of the Treasure Island Mobile Home Park in South Laguna would like to reach agreement on a new lease with the park’s owners. But they’re not quite prepared to barter away First Amendment rights of speech.

Park owners propose, at the end of the 10-year lease, to pay tenants for their mobile homes before redeveloping the property. Fair enough. But they also propose to levy penalties of 25% to 50% of the value of the mobile home on any tenant who criticizes at a public forum or writes letters of opposition to the company’s development plans. This is of course preposterous.

One Treasure Island Mobile Home partner defended the clause as fair, even after many tenants publicly denounced the proposal as economic blackmail. He said that since the company had made economic concessions, it didn’t want to offer tenants a lease if “they were going to continue to oppose us.”

The company categorically rejects the idea that the proposed lease infringes on tenants’ rights. If the new owners of the mobile-home park truly believe that, what they reallyought to be reading are the clauses covering rights of dissent in a document drawn up more than 200 years ago, starting with its First Amendment.

It is difficult to decide which is more objectionable: the attempt by Treasure Island Associates, the park’s owner, to stifle residents’ rights of free speech or the company’s defense of that approach. Both took an overabundance of gall.