Struggles continue at troubled Iowa City mobile home park

Billie Huddleston says she goes to friends' homes to bathe rather than use the shower at her place in Regency Mobile Home Park.

Sometimes the water smells like rotten eggs, other times bleach, she said. Sometimes it's clear, but other times it's orange, she said.

She and other residents say they use watercoolers or bottled water for drinking and boil before cooking.

“I don't even feed my animals the water out here,” Huddleston, 50, of 404 Dakota Trail, said of her cat and two dogs.

Such complaints are nothing new at Regency, located just south of Iowa City. But some residents - including Huddleston, who has lived there since 1994 - say the conditions are as bad as ever.

Not so, said Richard Walker, director of operations at Regency's corporate owner, Colorado-based Churchill Group. He said Regency is on par with other mobile home parks.

“You can never make all the residents happy,” he said. “And a lot of them want to stir the pot.”

Russ Royce, environmental specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said Regency is below average compared with other area parks when it comes to its management and wastewater treatment facility.

The DNR fined Regency $4,000 last spring for problems with the water plant.

This summer, it was cited for having excessive levels of several pollutants in its water, Royce said.

Walker said new lift stations will be installed soon. An engineer is conducting an evaluation ordered by the DNR and a new on-site manager started a month ago.

Residents also complain about how the park looks, including at least 10 abandoned homes among its 233 lots. Several other lots have large piles of debris on them, and a mound of dirt sits in an empty swimming pool next to the front office.

A Gazette reporter and photographer recently were kicked off Regency's grounds by a man who said he was the head of maintenance. The Gazette later asked Walker why he didn't want the media there if the park was in OK shape.

“All publicity, normally, is going to be bad publicity,” he said.

Local authorities have little power to force Regency to clean up. It is outside the city, and Johnson County does not have a housing code.

Three years ago, the Iowa City Housing Authority, which has jurisdiction over the county's housing assistance program, told several Regency tenants they must move to keep their assistance, unless Regency was cleaned.

No current Regency tenant receives housing assistance, said Norm Cate, Iowa City's senior housing inspector. He also said Regency was in worse shape than other area mobile home parks, calling the differences “night and day.”

Ownership cleaned the park to the city's satisfaction three years ago. At the time, Daise Polton, of 412 Dakota Trail, predicted Regency would be in decline again soon. “And I was right, wasn't I?” she said earlier this month.

She complained about the water, the abandoned trailer next door and of what she said was indifferent management.

Polton, 48, has lived in Regency 20 years. She'd like to move but said other parks won't accept her 1976 home because it's too old.

Some county supervisors talked three years ago about enacting a housing code, but the idea went nowhere. Supervisor Rod Sullivan said this month the county doesn't have major problems with other rental properties and wondered whether having a code for one property was worth it.

He called the situation frustrating and said Regency tenants are subjected to “a very substandard living environment.” He has encouraged the DNR to strictly enforce its rules on the water issues.