Residents of Lightner Creek Mobile Home Park received copies of a handwritten note earlier this month from Darlene Mann, the park’s owner, notifying them the property is under contract for sale.
The 40-unit park on 11 acres at 907 Lightner Creek Road (County Road 207) just west of Durango was listed for $750,000 by Durango real estate agent Tom Caver Jr.
Local attorney and business owner Chris Hamilton is the prospective buyer.
Caver said the property has been under contract for over a year, however, residents just received notice on Oct. 11. According to a 2020 law, park owners must provide homeowners with at least 90 days to express interest in purchasing the property and another 90 days to make an offer.
The property has been under supervision by state health officials since at least 2005 for an unlined wastewater lagoon that sits next to Lightner Creek. The water filters through the soil into the groundwater, which discharges into Lightner Creek.
Residents of the Lightner Creek Mobile Home Park have not reacted to notice of the sale with fear of displacement; in fact, some welcome the pending sale, hoping a new owner might ferry in needed improvements. That is a marked difference from residents of Westside Mobile Park, who formed a co-op earlier this year and used money loaned to them by La Plata County to purchase the park as they faced off with an out-of-state developer who made a competing offer.
“We’d like to save it if we can,” said Hamilton, the prospective buyer. “My daughter’s fifth grade teacher lives there. They own their own trailer. If the park shuts down, there’s a lot of families that own their own trailer and well, ‘goodbye’ – they just lost the major asset in their family. We need affordable housing.”
Diego Martinez has lived in the trailer park for two years and is among the residents who own a trailer.
“I can’t really fret about it too much,” Hernandez said of sale.
Johnny Staley managed the park for 13 months between 2020 and 2021. He owns three of the park’s trailers and lives in one of them. He expressed optimism that a new owner might clean up the park, which is littered with broken-down vehicles, broken glass and other wreckage.
“I think it could be a good thing,” Staley said. “Darlene let it deteriorate too far, it became ruins. She let the wrong kind of people in, it went to shambles. ... The kids were having to step over needles out here.”
Staley also said a well for drinking water had been having issues that Mann was reluctant to address.
The sewage system is the most pressing issue that Hamilton must solve. Mann’s last discharge permit expired in 2009 and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment rejected her 2010 application for a new permit. The park’s waste management system has operated without a discharge permit since 2010, risking fines of up to $10,000 per day. Mann has continued to test the discharged effluent from the pond despite not having a permit. The results of those tests reveal that the effluent exceeds the expired permit’s limits across the board.
“We’ve had engineers and tried to get a plan passed,” Mann said of her actions in the last few years. “They turned down one of them and now we have another one.”
Mann seems to know very little of the planning that Hamilton has underway to bring the system into compliance. Chris Hamilton’s brother, Eric Hamilton, is a mechanical engineer and is working with CDPHE to devise a solution. Eric said the state’s preliminary effluent limitations – the regulations dictating how much certain pollutants a system may release – are unattainable.
“We’re asking for an ‘alternatives analysis,’” Chris Hamilton said. “If the state refuses, then it’s a near certainty that the park will be shut down and all the tenants will lose their places to live. It’s going to be a very said deal.”
If the sale does go through, Chris Hamilton hopes to clean up the park and improve the living conditions. He is unsure whether he will raise rental rates.
Despite the nearly 20-year saga of this issue between Mann and the CDPHE, Chris Hamilton said he brings “an entirely new attitude and an engineer” to the situation and hopes to prevail.
“It’ll be a good investment if we can solve the problem,” he said. “If we can’t solve the problem then we’re not going to do it.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com