INSIDE

Sunny Point residents being evicted

by Meg Olson

Families living on the nameless road lined with manufactured homes at the rear of the Sunny Point Resort Park were shocked to find eviction notices taped to their doors September 22.

“I’m still on stun. I haven’t even gotten mad yet,” said Dani Magnusson who has lived at Sunny Point since 1994. “This is my home. Where do we go?”

The park is home to 14 families, most of them over 55 with a few families with young children. The “notice of closure of the manufactured/mobile home community at Sunny Point Resort Park” stated that all tenancies in the park, where tenants rent space and utility infrastructure, but own their homes, would be terminated on October 1, 2008. The area is being converted to another use.

Park manager Lincoln Huff said only the manufactured home portion of the park was being closed – the recreational vehicle park closest to Gulf Road would remain unchanged. Huff said the property’s owners had not yet determined what the new use of the property would be. “We’ve got bridges to cross,” he said. “This process takes a year and then I don’t know what it will be.”

Huff said the decision to close the park was made because owners did not want to pay for repairs to the on-site sewage system being required by the county health department. “It’s just not economically feasible to do,” he said. “The septic we know would cost in the vicinity of $100,000 and other situations needed to be taken care of as well.”
A county health department incident report documents the county’s efforts to get park owners, Kun Kook and Pyong Lim Chung, to repair the sewage system that has, on two separate occasions, let sewage escape onto one resident’s lawn and under another’s home in July 2006.

A corrective action plan signed in August 2006 by former park manager Kathy Jackson was to address replacing old pipes and the failed septic system that serves nine of the 16 manufactured homes, two of which are not occupied. “We have held off on civil penalties because they were working on it,” said county environmental health supervisor Kyle Dodd. When a design was submitted in February of 2007 Dodd said it needed to be changed to meet the needs of the property. “We went back and forth with the designers and it became a situation where there was not enough ongoing activity to solve the problem,” he said.

Following another administrative hearing in July, the design was approved in August with a date for installation of September 2, 2007. It didn’t happen.

“The bid to repair was more than the owners wanted to spend and they made the decision to evict and make the problem go away,” Dodd said. “Abandoning the property is one way to resolve the violation,” at least in the long term. In the short tem, he said, the county would require measures to insure tenants have a healthy place to live until they have to move. “Even if one year is the time frame we won’t allow the system to continue to fail,” he said.

Park residents are talking to lawyers, hoping to be able to beat the eviction or get the time period extended.

The owner’s representative did not return calls asking for comment.
If they do have to leave, Sunny Point residents know they’ll have to leave their homes behind. “We can’t move it,” said Sasha Stidman, who lives there with her three children, ages one month to six years old. “There’s no access road out of here. You just have to write it off as a loss.”

Even if access were available, most home owners said their units were too old to move. “And even if we could move them, where would we move them to?” Magnusson asked.

Residents are wondering if they can find somewhere affordable to live. “If the worst comes to worst we’ll have to rent and there’s no place we can afford to rent on the Point,” Watson said.