City Council Rewind: Cabrillo Mobile Home Park Resident Sounds Off

In the oral communications section of , Cabrillo Mobile Home Estates resident Erving Richmond addressed the Council.

He spoke spiritedly on the rent control issues facing Capitola mobile home parks, for which citizens were asked to report their income to park owners. He called out the owners as well as the Council, for what he believed to be unethical behaviour.

Read Richmond's impassioned speech below.

“In the past session of the City Council, a couple of people used the phrase ‘Stop the bleeding’ to revile the Council spending too much money to uphold its rent control laws.

It is time now to set the record straight. Mobile home owners have not drawn blood from the city treasury. On the contrary, homeowners, keeping faith with the City Council, have contributed over $400,000 to revive the city treasury. In contrast, it is the park owners, like the owner of the Surf & Sand, who have sucked blood from the City, by implementing their phony slap suits against the City.

The owner of Surf & Sand inherited his property. He did nothing to earn it. The owner of Cabrillo Mobile Home Estates paid less than $1 million for our park. It is now valued $5-6 million. Neither park owner deserves their profits from devious maneuvers.

Rent control protected all residents, equally. A new ordinance, number 953, does not provide equal protection under the law, as required by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

Your new ordinance divides homeowners into three groups based on economic conditions. The most abhorrent part of that vile piece of legislation, is that it empowers blood-thirsty park owners to decide which group people will fall into. This is an outrageous violation of our privacy protected by the Constitution. I will never share my personal income records with my greedy park owner.

Your ordinance is not only unconstitutional, it is the act of a group of ethics-challenged people groveling at the feet of park owners who are not above using gangster-like methods, extortion for example, to obtain their ill-begotten profits, all of this causing severe mental and physical injury to people who gave you their votes after you all went around town, begging for their votes and making all kids of promises that you have now broken.

An effort by one or two of you to claim that you had no choice is simply a sickening cop out. Your undoing of rent control is a heinous betrayal of trust by your body. The very least you can do is to honor the petition of over 800 people, to allow a vote by the people of Capitola to decide in a democratic fashion, the life or death of rent control.” 

After Richmond's statement, the Council motioned to apportion $193,000 to residents for rent assistance.