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Mobile home throng shows up

Park dwellers from across Pinellas County take their case against rezonings to the Seminole City Council.

By ANNE LINDBERG
Published October 30, 2005

SEMINOLE - When fire Marshal Edward Mullins drove into the Seminole City Hall parking lot last week, no parking spaces were available and a standing-room-only crowd of about 200 was unable to fit in council chambers.

Mullins decreed that the City Council meeting, slated to start at 7 p.m., could not go on unless the audience was pared to a safe number.

It was the first time the fire marshal has shut down a Seminole council meeting, but officials expect that it won't be the last.

Most in the crowd were part of a new coalition of seven mobile home parks. Only two of those parks, Bay Pines and Harbor Lights, are within the Seminole city limits.

Still, mobile home owners from across the county wanted Seminole council members to help lobby for laws to protect them from losing their homes to developers. They wanted the council to refuse to rezone mobile home park land to allow condos or other development projects.

Smaller parades of mobile home owners had become a regular sight for council members in recent months, since residents found out the owner of Harbor Lights had a contract to sell the property to John Loder. Loder had announced he plans a multimillion-dollar condominium and townhouse project there.

Harbor Lights is just one park whose mobile home owners are facing eventual eviction, and a countywide coalition has been building. The result for the Seminole council on Tuesday was an estimated 200 people, many on walkers or in wheelchairs, trying to crowd into a council chamber with only 92 chairs and an overall capacity for 110 people.

Mayor Dottie Reeder announced that the meeting would be postponed until 8 p.m. while city employees prepared the auditorium at the Recreation Hall across the street as an alternate meeting site.

"This is a first," Reeder said, but not likely the last. "They indicated to me there would be more and more of them."

Seminole City Manager Frank Edmunds said staff members would explore the possibility of installing speakers elsewhere in City Hall, so people could hear the proceedings inside the building without overcrowding the council meeting room.

If that does not work, he said, meetings will be held in the rec center auditorium. If Loder or someone else ever does apply for Harbor Lights to be rezoned, the hearings will automatically be scheduled for the larger room at the rec center, Edmunds said.

It took two engines full of firefighters only eight minutes to set up 201 chairs in the rec center auditorium. By the time the meeting began, some of the elderly mobile home owners had left. But a group of Boy Scouts who were working on their communications badges had joined the crowd, which had dwindled to about 115, not including the council, city staff members, the media and two sheriff's deputies.

Expecting an onslaught of speakers, the council canceled the awards portion of the meeting (many of those receiving honors had not been able to stay) and also postponed a workshop that was to follow the meeting. One of the workshop items concerned the city's fire code and was the reason the fire marshal had come to the meeting. Reeder had earlier announced that the council did not plan to discuss affordable housing that evening.

"We do have a lot of residents who want to address council," Reeder told the crowd. "We want to accommodate them."

Then council members spent 17 minutes and 17 seconds on the first 14 items on the agenda, voting on issues and taking little or no time to explain to the audience what was at stake. Those items included a council salary boost. (See related story, Page 6.)

Reeder then opened the floor to speakers, who repeated the same pleas and stories the council has heard at every meeting for the past few months.

One mobile home park resident, Ray Martin, had written on the subject line of the "Request to be Heard" form: "Question: What is affordable housing for old residents that live on almost nothing of income?"

Martin, like many other speakers, acknowledged that park owners have the right to sell their property. But, he said, many of the residents will lose everything because their homes cannot be moved. He referred to an 83-year-old neighbor who "was crying the other day. It really touched me. What is affordable housing?"

Harbor Lights resident Robert Knop said he and many of the other mobile home owners thought the park would be their final home. He urged the council to seriously consider the effect of any rezoning.

"Is it worth putting several hundred seniors out in the street?" Knop asked.

Jenny Cocciardi was the final speaker. The president of the Golden Lantern Mobile Home Park homeowners association said the audience represented a coalition of seven Pinellas parks, including the Golden Lantern, Harbor Lights, Bay Pines, Lake View and Lake Shore.

Cocciardi said the coalition was simply the vanguard of a growing movement that would spread across the entire state.

When she finished, only 46 minutes had elapsed since the meeting had been called to order.

[Last modified October 30, 2005, 01:13:18]