Mobile home parks face utility changes

Moorcroft trailer park owners accepted the invitation from the council to a workshop on Monday before the regular council meeting to discuss the decision the town must reach regarding utility fees. The concern has been a lack of fairness, leading to a situation where residents are not all paying the same share of the water investment fees.

Mayor Ben Glenn opened the discussion, stating, "We're all familiar with this, we've had a lot of discussion on this for the last several years. Tonight is just a workshop to discuss how to move forward with this process."

He assured the audience that, because of the absence of two council members, no decision would be made at that subsequent meeting.

The mayor then read the pertinent part of the ordinance in question: "A fee is charged for each residence, residential unit, building structure, facility, travel trailer, mobile home park space and premises connecting to the town's water and sewer system."

"Not everyone is being charged the same throughout the town for the investment fees," Glenn spelled out, "So that's what we're going to work on – cleaning that up. When we did this we had the big discussions, nothing ever happened, we just kind of let it die. Now, we have to pick up that ball and get it moving again one way or another."

Town Attorney Pat Carpenter advised these property owners that the discrepancy with which the town currently manages this situation is, in fact, illegal and must be corrected, "Legally, we cannot treat residents different. We have to apply the law equally to everyone in town so everyone who receives water and sewer services in this town has to be charged the same fee. The problem we've got right now is that we're not applying the rule equally to everyone across the board."

The issue that has stymied proper adherence to the law is that certain parks employ individual meters for each space while others have one meter dispersing water to each space.

While the council recognized the owners' reiterated concerns regarding being charged for empty spaces and unrented trailers, the mayor spoke candidly regarding the only other option available to the single meter/multi space parks: to install lines between individual spaces and meters, which will put a very expensive burden on both the town, who must purchase the added meters, and the owner, who must pay for the pipe and installation.

After more back and forth, the workshop was adjourned to convene the regular council meeting with the offer of another workshop if the owners felt the need to further elucidate their point and offer a viable alternative.