Millionaire Says Tenants Cause Squalor : Oxnard: Trailer camp owner insists he has poured money into repairs. State considers legal action.

Richard M. Walbergh knows what his critics have said about him.

They have called him a slumlord, a Malibu millionaire squeezing out his fortune by emptying the pockets of his poor farm worker tenants.

They have accused the 65-year-old real estate investor of turning his back on the decay of the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, a crowded trailer camp on the city’s southeast side.

But Walbergh says he has been unfairly cast as an uncaring absentee landlord.

He said he has made only modest profit on the five-acre park since purchasing it nearly 30 years ago. At the same time, he said, he has poured thousands of dollars into correcting repeated health and safety code violations at what affordable housing advocates have called Ventura County’s worst slum.

“When we bought that park it wasn’t a slum and we didn’t make it a slum; the tenants made it a slum, “ said Walbergh at his ranch-style Malibu Canyon home. “I really think the tenants have a pretty good deal out there.

“Even if we were to close the park up, where would the people go?”

State housing officials say that question represents the underlying dilemma in enforcing health and safety laws at mobile home parks such as the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge.

Despite having received hundreds of correction notices since 1985, a search of state records revealed that Walbergh never has been fined or criminally cited for failing to make repairs to the Commercial Avenue park which has about 1,100 residents and an average of 28 trailers an acre.

State officials announced last week that they are considering legal action against Walbergh to bring the park into compliance.

“We have not taken as hard a line as we should have,” said Jack Kerin, field operations manager for the state Department of Housing and Community Development. “We’re at the point now where something has to be done.”

But Kerin warned that legal action against Walbergh could result in mass evictions at the park, where many of the tenants also have been warned to make repairs to their old and broken coaches.

“That’s the reason we’ve held off all these years,” Kerin said. “We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.”

Conceived in 1949 as Punky’s Trailer Court, the park has a history of alleged health and safety code violations.

By 1953, when the name was changed to the Oxnard Mobilehome Lodge, the previous owner had been ordered to correct drainage problems and remove fire hazards, according to state records. Shortly after Walbergh bought the park in 1964, state officials reported that it was in compliance with state law. Inspection reports over the years revealed little about the park’s condition.

It wasn’t until early 1985, when fire destroyed three trailers and left two dozen people homeless, that the state conducted its first significant inspection.

Inspectors reported 293 park violations and 290 tenant violations, according to state records.

The episode touched off a flurry of legal activity. Attorneys for the state housing department became involved. The Ventura County district attorney’s office toured the park and threatened legal action.

But in the summer of 1985, Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard E. Simon told state officials no further action would be needed.

“I do not believe any citations are necessary at this time as I believe that the positive progress we have seen will continue,” Simon wrote to state officials.

In the state’s file on the Mobilehome Lodge, which is as thick as a couple of big city telephone books, the last letter from the district attorney’s office is a 1986 inquiry about 500 new park violations.

There has been no follow-up since, a district attorney’s spokesman confirmed.

While attorneys have paid little attention, problems at the park have mounted.

According to state records, inspectors in late 1991 reported 1,197 violations of which more than half were blamed on the park owner. Two months later, a reinspection discovered that 687 of those violations had not been corrected, 510 of them listed as the owner’s responsibility.

Some of the owner violations have included faulty electrical wiring, improper drainage and overflowing garbage dumpsters. Renter violations include not allowing enough space between coaches and illegal conversions of rooms, such as kitchens, into sleeping quarters.

However, Walbergh has maintained for years that he has done his best to repair the park. In fact, the most recent reinspection last month reported 156 violations at the park, with 108 Walbergh’s responsibility.

“We are spending money in large chunks every month to bring things into compliance,” Walbergh said. “But remember everything breaks there frequently.”

William R. Derrick, who owns the Oxnard company managing the park, reported income at the park of $261,367 and expenditures of $225,560 for the first seven months of last year. Of the $225,000 in expenses, he said, about $86,000 went toward repairs.

The $35,807 net gain represents a 3% annual return on the property which Derrick valued at $2 million.

However, because property values have dropped in recent years, Walbergh estimated the property now to be worth $1 million to $1.5 million, putting the annual return at 4% to 6%.

“You can look at the numbers in a lot of different ways,” said Lee Pliscou, directing attorney for the Oxnard office of California Rural Legal Assistance. “When he brings the park up to code, then we’ll talk about profits.”

Members of the city’s Mobilehome Park Rent Review Board were so dissatisfied with conditions at the trailer park that last year they denied a rent hike that is usually considered automatic upon request.

Walbergh appealed that ruling to a private arbitrator, who last week overrode the rent review board and granted an increase that will raise rents between $4.76 and $6.88 per space each month. This will make the new monthly rents $163.27 to $236.13. The rents are the fourth lowest for mobile home parks in the city.

Walbergh has applied for another rent increase for this year. The city’s rent review board is scheduled to consider the matter next month.

“We have increasing costs like everybody else does,” Walbergh explained. “I don’t think that’s gouging.”

But tenants are outraged at the decision, saying that Walbergh, who according to property records owns millions of dollars of Southern California real estate, has put little of his capital behind fixing the trailer park as it has rotted over the years.

“He hasn’t done anything for us,” said Luis Teran, a disabled celery picker who heads the parks tenant association. “He has all the power in the world to make things better, but they have stayed the same if not gotten worse.”

On a recent day, Teran walked through the pothole-plagued park which sits in the shadow of a defunct drive-in theater.

Poor laborers fill every nook, converting kitchens and patios and toolsheds into places to sleep. Cars bump along rutted roads near children who take to the asphalt because they have nowhere else to play.

“We have no place to park our cars, there is no park for our children,” Teran said, surveying the camp where tangled webs of power lines crisscross overhead and sometimes shower sparks. “Here’s the real test of how much money has been spent here. Show me where things have improved.”

The trailer camp is tucked behind an industrial strip just off of Oxnard Boulevard at about the point where it becomes Pacific Coast Highway.

Twenty miles down the coast highway--in a secluded canyon studded with million-dollar homes--is Walbergh’s five-acre spread. His ranch-style home was the third built in the canyon.

He said the Oxnard trailer park was occupied mostly by elderly women when he bought it nearly 30 years ago. Over the years, he said, it became a staging area for migrant laborers drawn by the low rent and the convenience of being near downtown Oxnard.

Walbergh said those remain the reasons the park always is full.

“If somebody moves out, there are two or three families ready to move in,” he said. “I think they are getting a fair shake for what they are paying.”

As the correction notices have mounted, Walbergh said he has tried to sell the park. It was in escrow last year but the deal fell through.

He said he is stuck with a park that nobody wants and nobody likes.

“If the city wants to buy my property I’m willing to sit down and listen,” Walbergh said. “The park has gotten too old, the coaches are too old and it all should be changed. But at this point I don’t have a clue on how to do it correctly.”

The city of Oxnard for months has been trying to find a replacement park for residents of the Mobilehome Lodge.

City officials tentatively agreed last year to move the trailer camp to a field near the south Oxnard neighborhood of Tierra Vista, but reversed that decision after neighbors complained.

A sprawling commercial and residential development proposed for the city’s northeast side now is the leading contender to be the replacement site and, unlike Tierra Vista, representatives of the nearby neighborhood of Rio Lindo last week embraced the project.

The Oxnard City Council is scheduled to consider the matter Tuesday.

“I think we have a City Council that is doing what it can to remedy the situation,” said Housing Director Sal Gonzalez. “But it has been frustrating because there’s not a lot that we as a city can do.”

But in a memo to the city’s rent review board, City Atty. Gary Gillig wrote that city officials could assume regulation and code enforcement responsibility from the state for the Mobilehome Lodge and other mobile home parks throughout Oxnard.

In fact, the city regulated its mobile home parks from 1973 to 1982. “We do not have the manpower to do that,” said Gonzalez, noting that the cash-strapped city does not have the money to take control of the program.

It is because city leaders are powerless to demand or enforce compliance at the Mobilehome Lodge that they have embarked on this ambitious effort to create a new park for the farm worker families. But even if the project wins approval, city officials still must contend with a park that is likely to fill up just as soon as it empties out.

“If we emptied the park tomorrow, I guarantee you I would fill it up in 30 days,” said Walbergh, citing the ever-present need for low-income housing.

But rural legal assistance attorney Pliscou said no one is seeking to shut down the park.

“All we’re asking is for the owner to comply with the law,” he said. “Is that so much to ask?”