Category: Floating Home Law

I hope everyone had a terrific Thanksgiving!  The next meeting of the Park and Marina Coalition is in Tigard on Tuesday, December 10th, 9am – 12pm at Multifamily NW.

The first Park and Marina Landlord Tenant Coalition Meeting of the next major legislative session (2021) met earlier this month and went well.  Many people shared ideas of what we could focus on between now and the 2021 legislative session.  

As you can imagine, I did bring up a list of issues and concerns that marina tenants face, both issue which didn’t get a chance to be discussed last year due to time (remember this was our first time having an official voice in the Coalition) or issues that have come up since we dropped our initial bill in the Oregon State Legislature.

Proposed list of issues :

• Rent increases
• Security deposit caps
• First Months rent caps
• Incentives for Landlords to sell the marina to tenants (park tenants have these benefits, marina tenant do not)
• Tougher penalties for Landlord interference with the sale of residents’ floating homes
• Increased statute of limitations for ORS Chapter 90 violations (currently 1 year)
• Dock/ramp maintenance
  • Board repairs
  • Snow and ice removal
  • Moss/buildup removal
• Dock lighting
• Dredging
• Wake protection
• Parking restrictions
• Piling maintenance
• Recreational water use protections
• Swim ladders
• Fire safety equipment, pump testing, fire evacuation plans, fire safety training, etc.

There are only so many issues that we can work through in any given lead-up to the next major legislative session. After reviewing our list of marina issues with the Coalition, we decided that we can make the most impact within our limited time on a few:

• Habitability – there are already Oregon Statute laws requiring a landlord maintain common area in good working order.  The laws specifically call out items such as providing water and fuel, keeping common grounds maintained for normal use, solid land for manufactured houses to be located on, etc.  Even though they apply to use, they are written with a land-based-house focus.  The statutes don’t necessarily call out ramps, docks, the life or death implications of snow/ice removal, or floating home spaces protected from wakes.  And while it does require “safety from the hazards of fire” it does not call out the need for marina fire systems and water pumps. However, I routinely hear from floating home owner tenants about habitability – docks in disrepair, missing or broken deck boards, loose nails, and lack of any useable fire equipment (which also causes floating home insurance companies to pass along that risk in the form of increase premiums at moorages without enough fire fighting tools).  We all know that common area maintenance or lack thereof can cause death and significant loss of property due to docks being in disrepair or lack of fire fighting equipment. Let’s change that.

• Parking – Unlike park tenants, marina tenants (by the very nature of living on the water), we all park in a common area parking lot – we are at the mercy of the landlord about our vehicles, how many we can have, what condition they have to be in, what we can do with our cars int eh parking lot, restrictions on washing cars or performing light maintenance on them, where we can park without getting towed, etc.  It has been reported to me that some landlords are using the assignment of parking spaces and the regulation of guest and service provider parking as a way to interfere with tenants use of the premises – including one landlord who assigned a tenant a space under a wire where flocks of birds congregate (the tenant’s vehicle is a constant mess) and the landlord refuses to assign the tenant a different available space.  Apartment tenants have more rights regrading common area parking than marina tenants.  We should look into changing this.

• Recreational water use rights – It is a no-brainer that floating home owners purchase houses on water because they like being on the water.  Many of us boat, fish, canoe, paddle and sail away from our houses on a regular basis. However, our right to park a boat at our marina to not protected by our residential leases.  Landlords can prevent a home owner from having a boat onsite, or terminate a boat lease as a means of driving out a tenant.  We would like our boat leases/permissions to be protected from evictions by the same rights we have as home owners – 30 day notice for a legal case AND the right to cure the problems and keep our boat on site. For many of us, without the ability to enjoy our hobbies and lifestyle on the water, what’s the point of being in that marina? Let’s make a stand together on this very reasonable right and fight this from being used as a tool for constructive evictions.

You may have an important issue that is not on this list – it may even be one of the other 12 or so issues that are near and dear to my heart which did not get chosen for this legislative session. The Coalition likely cannot address additional issues during this next legislative session.  However, please let me know if you are having other important issues, and maybe I can offer advice on where to go or how to approach the issue.

If you are experiencing one of the issues mentioned above, let me know.  Better yet, come to the Coalition meetings and make your voices heard.  It is uncertain at this time is we will get our own Marina Subcommittee to address marina only issue like we had last year.  So come and participate, weigh in on ideas for our next bill.

We will be discussing the Habitability issue with a focus on Marinas on December 10th at the Tigard location.  The other meetings which affect both marinas and park tenants tend to be in Salem, but we will try to time the marina-only issues to coincide with the Tigard meeting dates.
Be sure to make a note of the other dates below for future Coalition meetings.

We passed a MAJOR piece of legislation to protect marina tenants this year…now we have the opportunity to do more.  Let’s do this!!

I am grateful for everyone on this mailing list who has supported our efforts to improve the floating home owner lifestyle.

HOORAY!!

Our Floating Home Landlord-Tenant Bill was signed into law by the governor TODAY!  It is law!!!  It will become effective on January 1, 2020.

SB 586 includes our Marina Issues which the Marina Subcommittee worked on throughout most of 2018, as well as the other issues we’ve been working on in the MH Coalition since 2017 which also benefit Marina Tenants in various ways.

HOW EXCITING IS THIS?!?  Our bill ended up being 62 pages of additional and improved legislative protections which we do not enjoy today but will benefit from in January!!!!

Marina Tenants from around Oregon met for the first time on April 17, 2018 to change our living situations.  We were listened to by the members of the MH Coalition.  They established a Marina Issues Subcommittee for us to debate the concepts of what we wanted and what Landlords wanted.  Together we made progress. 

SOME THANKS ARE IN ORDER…

I want to thank some very special people who without them, we would not be here today.

I’d like to thank John VanLandingham for writing that first article for the Oregon Bar Association entitled “Rights of a Mobile Home Owner Threatened with Eviction from a Mobile Home Park” (now revised and updated by someone else as of May 2018) which I originally found online in April 2016 that connected for me, for the first time, the concept that floating home owners in marinas were, first and foremost, considered “Tenants” in the eyes of Oregon law, not treated as typical “homeowners”. Then, following that logic, this discovery helped me to understand that Oregon law addresses floating home owner tenants rights with the same statute laws as manufactured home owner tenants in parks. And for the first time, this trail steered me toward already-established resources for Manufactured Housing Tenant associations and resources to find out more about our rights. It had taken me 2 years of research online before I “accidentally” discovered this article and subsequenly the existence of ORS 90.505 – 90.830 (Oregon laws protecting park and marina tenants).

I’d like to next thank Ken Pryor, the Program Coordinator of the Manufactured Communities Resource Center (soon to be renamed the Manufactured and Floating Communities Resource Center!) who took my desperate call in April of 2017. I had spent a year studying the Floating Home Tenant Laws on my own and realized the dire predicament which floating home tenants would face during an eviction. But I still had so many questions and no access to an attorney who was familiar with ORS 90.505-90.830. At that time, NO resources existed for floating home owners who rent their slips. There were no tenant groups, no associations, no attorneys who represented marina tenants, no online resources to help point you in the right direction. This website you are on today did not exist. There was, in 2017, no one to turn to to find answers or help. Ken Pryor, who serves as a manufactured housing park resource, not only took my call but invited me to attend the Manufactured Housing Landlord Tenant Coalition (MH Coalition) on May 9, 2017 to try to learn more about my rights and the law.

I’d like to thank the MH Coalition for welcoming me and my listening to my Homeowner Tenant concerns as they apply to marina tenancies over the last 2 years. I cannot change the series of events which devastated our family for years, but I can work toward preventing it from happening to any other Floating Home Owner Tenants. I have found a place where I can make a positive impact for all of us. I have only missed one meeting due to a snowstorm. If you haven’t been to one of our monthly MH Coalition meetings, you should try it. Stakeholders from various Landlord and Tenant groups get together to raise issues and concerns and engage in lively discussion to arrive at potential solutions to the issues that everyone can live with. In the end, the reason we are making progress is because the concept of the MH Coalition works. The MH Coalition is the vehicle that allowed us to introduce a bill to the Oregon Senate and get our laws passed!!!

I’d like to thank Representative Tina Kotek, Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, who is a champion of tenant rights. I reached out to her in August of 2017 when I’d come to fully understand the personal and financial devastation that can be caused when a Floating Home Owner is under threat of eviction. She elevated the issue and asked us to testify one month later, in September 2017, at the Oregon House Interim Committee on Human Services and Housing hearing to help lawmakers understand how current laws were inadequate to protect floating home owners. Between the MH Coalition support and Rep. Kotek’s support, it became apparent that floating home owner issues should be heard.

I’d like to thank…YOU. I will always remember April 17, 2018 as the day we spoke up together. WE changed the course of history. After I made flyers and postcards and tried my best to get the word out about the first ever “Marina Issues focused MH Coalition Meeting” on April 17th, I had no idea if anyone would show up. But, YOU showed up!! In a standing-room only MH Coalition meeting in land-locked Tigard, floating home tenants from all over Portland, Gresham and Scappoose stood up and shared their experiences and perspectives with the MH Coalition. It was beautiful. From that day forward, we stopped being passive victims to the whims of several rogue marina landlords and started protecting our rights together.

I’d like to thank John VanLandingham and John DiLorenzo, facilitators of the MH Coalition, for listening to us that first day, along with park tenants and landlords. They had intended for marina issues to take up about half of the meeting – 90 minutes. But it was clear after the first 90 minutes, that we were going to need more time since we’d not had a legislative voice for marinas in decades. They gave us the entire meeting, and then established “The Marina Issues Subcommittee” so that we could continue to do the necessary work to find solutions to our most pressing needs. This additional responsibility which they both volunteered to take up is much appreciated.

I’d like to thank all of the marina tenants who participated and came to the various floating home owner tenant-only meetings during the spring/summer of 2018. You showed up with courage to share your stories and we realized we were not alone. Thank you for getting the word out to your neighbors and friends. Thank you for taking your time to ensure that our rights are protected and that we create a little better future for us than we had a year ago.

I would like to thank the Marina Landlords and members of the Marina Issues Subcommittee. Our discussions were challenging at times. In the end, our working together to find solutions showed us that we do have some shared interests and can work together on those in the future – e.g. damage from wakes, etc.

I would also like to thank the good marina landlords. I know you exist and I know you by name. You care about your tenants as individuals. You hire out your property management duties to people whose job it is to know and understand the laws. You treat your marina tenants with dignity. You don’t enforce the rules whimsically, unfairly, or only when it benefits you. I want to commend you for finding a way to make it work such that you maintain your business profits and your residents maintain their dignity. Keep up the good work. We are not a threat to you. “Bad Actor” Landlords are the biggest threat to your business because they perpetuate an us-versus-them mentality between tenant and landlords, and continually tarnish the reputation of all marina landlords. I would like to personally invite the good marina landlords to become more active in helping to stop a handful of bad apple landlords from violating the rights of their tenants. Without bad landlords abusing their power, there is no need for a coalition and a tenants’ rights group such as ours. Keep being that stellar example for other landlords to follow.

I’d like to thank several individuals (who gave me their permission to thank them publicly – I never betray someone’s privacy). I really want you to know how much I appreciate them and their efforts.

Sigfried Seeliger, thank you for offering tenants a safe location to meet. Those early floating home owners meetings were imperative to helping us understand what common issues we all were experiencing on the rivers. What we uncovered in your community space was the basis for the marina issues we worked toward resolving with this law.

Thank you, Nancy Ward, for supporting us and giving us a voice on the radio. I have met several floating home owners who have said that the reason they chose to speak about their experiences is because they heard our story on the radio and then felt the courage to share their own stories. We found our power in these numbers. Thank you for offering us a way to reach out to other floating home owners.

D.M.D., thank you for showing up at all of the MH Coalition meetings, getting the word out, participating in the process and being our group’s biggest cheerleader – some days when I was tired, it made all the difference that you enthusiastically appreciated these efforts.

And thank you to the many of you who posted flyers and are watching out for other neighbors at your own marinas who may be having issues. Keep sending them to the website for help and to me when they are in need. Keep telling them that they are not alone.

Last, but definitely not least, I would like to give a thank you and a big shout out to my father, Norm, a retired attorney. Countless times over the years, I have called him in tears, in joy, in frustration, in panic, and on every occasion, he was able to help me through (as he has done my entire life) with wise advice, guidance and patience, as well as a lot of translating of law language when I first started trying to understand it. When I was little, he always used to tell me that I’d make a great attorney. I never did become the attorney he had hoped I’d be, but his influence on me is helping hundreds of Floating Home Owner Tenants in Oregon and I hope that I am making him proud.

Next steps:

• We are taking break to celebrate and the MH Coalition will reconvene in the fall after we have rested.

The final version of SB 586 can be found here.  

At about 10 am today, June 29, 2019, our MH Coalition bill (SB 586-C) was addressed by the Senate!

Senator Fagan carried it, saying only, “Good bill, should pass.”

There was no further discussion or questions.

It passed, on a 25 to 2 vote, with three Republicans absent. The two no votes were Senators Olsen (Clackamas County) and Thomsen (Hood River).

The next steps are for the bill to be signed by the Senate President, then the House Speaker, and finally the Governor. We expect no issues with these final steps.

Our bill is scheduled to become law on January 1, 2020.

I’ll provide a more in-dept update later, but I wanted to get this out to you right away.

Thank you to everyone for their support.

A press conference was just held.  Enough Republican Senators are coming back so that voting on bills can resume on Saturday.  

The budget bills are their priority – our bill not a budget bill.  It is unclear at this early time (their press conference just ended) as to whether or not our bill SB 586 will be heard for a vote.  They may be too backed up to get to it – ours was scheduled for Sunday.  We will see!

Fingers crossed again!!

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/06/oregon-senate-republicans-will-return-to-work-on-saturday-leader-says.html

Our state Senate activities have made national and global news appearing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Below are links to a brief summary article from the Wall Street Journal that summarizes some highlights of the HB 2020 story and where we are today.

• Link to WSJ Article on the WSJ Website (for WSJ subscribers)
• PDF Version of WSJ Article (2 pages)

NOTE: FloatingHomeOwners.com (FHO) remains neutral on the topic of climate bill HB 2020. Anything we post regarding the events surrounding the HB 2020 walk-out are shared for the sole purpose of keeping you factually informed about what is happening with our Coalition / Floating Home bill SB-586. Further, any creative interpretations of FHO’s ‘leanings’ regarding political affiliation or our opinions on HB 2020 which one might theorize from this article or any other FHO post are merely guesswork and should be considered a reader’s opinion, not based on fact.

It’s hard to write this today.

I’ve been providing regular email updates over the course of the last 2 weeks to those in our FHO email group because the walk-out at the Oregon Senate have made national news and I wanted to offer direct commentary to help our group better understand how the unfolding news is impacting our Coalition bill.

Here is the good news since my last posting here:

• Our bill, SB 586-C, passed the Oregon House today (Monday, June 24, 2019), on a 57 to 1 vote. Representative Bill Post (Keizer, St. Paul and Newberg district) was the sole “no” vote. He did not give a reason; but we’ve been told by our people at the Capitol that he frequently votes ‘no’.

• The bill now goes to the Oregon Senate for concurrence with the amendments made in the House. That vote is now scheduled for this Sunday, June 30th at a session that is scheduled to start at 10 am.

• If the Senate votes ‘yes’ on our bill (and, remember, Oregon Senators voted UNANIMOUSLY YES on the unamended version of our bill a few months ago, on April 17th), then our bill would be signed my the Governor and become law. We expect no real opposition to our bill on the Senate side this time as well. We are THAT close!!!

(Cue sinister music…and now for the bad news…)

• Unfortunately, as of June 20th, the Oregon Senate is not meeting, because it lacks a quorum (quorum is the presence of the minimum number of members in order for the group to be able to conduct business – this number is set by our state constitution).

• This is because the Senate Republicans have walked out in protest of a big environmental bill, HB 2020 (known as the cap and trade bill), which passed the House last week on a largely party-line vote.

• Most of the Republican Senators have publicly stated they have left the state and do no intend on returning to vote on HB 2020, nor any bill remaining in 2019.

• With all of the Senate Democrats present, the Senate is 2 members short of achieving quorum. We need 2 Republican Senators to return to the Senate floor in order for our bill to be heard on Sunday, June 30, 2019.

• The Oregon Constitution requires that the 2019 Legislative Session end on Sunday, June 30, 2019.

• If at least 2 of the Senate Republicans do not return by Sunday, June 30, then our bill – and hundreds of others – will die.

• We could bring our bill back in a special session, which the Governor indicates she may call to address several large agencies which do not yet have approved 2019-2021 budgets. Or in the 2020 session, which starts on February 3, 2020. But, in either case, we would have to start over, with a new sponsor and bill number and hearings.

NEXT STEPS

Unfortunately, as well, there seems to be nothing we can personally do to try to get the Republican Senators to return to the Senate floor to vote on our Floating Home bill.

Our best hope now for SB 586 to pass in this legislative session is for this to occur:

• A deal is struck regarding HB 2020 and the Republican Senators come back to vote on our bill on Sunday.
• AND, that there is time in the day for our bill (remember now hundreds of others are waiting in the queue along with ours) to be heard and voted upon.

My fingers are crossed!…but it doesn’t look promising that the missing Senators will return in time to vote on SB 586.

Hey, Everyone!

Much progress has been made but things are down to the wire to get our bill passed before this legislative session wraps up on June 30, 2019. We need all fingers crossed that we can get everything done before this legislative session ends on June 30, 2019.

The MH Coalition leaders are hopeful that we can still accomplish the voting required, but time is of the essence and it will be challenging.

Here is what has happened since April 1:

• April 8, 2019 (rescheduled from April 1): Senate Bill 586, our MH Coalition bill, passed out of the Senate Housing Committee on Monday, April 8, unanimously. Chuck Carpenter and John Vanlandingham were present to answer questions. There were none. The only drama was whether the required fiscal impact statement (“FIS”) would be done in time, and whether it might indicate that there would be a fiscal impact (on MCRC/OHCS). The hearing started at 3 pm; the FIS was filed onto OLIS at about 4 pm. And it showed a “minimal” impact – which spared us a referral to Ways and Means.
• April 17, 2019: Sen. Prozanski carried our bill on the floor of the Senate and it was passed UNANIMOUSLY 30-0!! THIS IS THE POWER OF THE COALITION!! When you get two sides of an issue together to work through solutions agreeable to both sides, you get legislators who feel comfortable supporting your bill because they have trust in the process and know that our solution is agreeable to both sides of the arguments.
• April 29, 2019: Our bill is now referred to as SB 586A (with our amendments added) and held a hearing in the House Human Services and Housing Committee. John VanLandingham and Chuck Carpenter testified in support and there were no questions from committee members.
• May 22, 2019 (rescheduled from May 20): This was nearly the last possible date that our bill could be worked before the May 24th deadline where out bill would have died if it had not been worked. Thank you to John VanLandingham for pushing and pushing to get our bill session in time.
  • Things got very hairy in terms of meeting deadlines for this session. In the end, the amendments are as close as we could get them to the MH Coalition’s original intent, but they aren’t perfect. We are keeping track of some language we will pursue changing in the 2020-2021 legislative session.
  • At the House work session, we provided brief written testimony in support of the bill. Chuck Carpenter and John VanLandingham spoke in support of the bill. There were a few questions.
  • The bill passed unanimously, 9 to zero.
  • But about 30 minutes before the work session, we got the LFO analysis and our bill was referred to the Ways and Means Committee to sort out some funding questions around the park/marina Mandatory Mediation portion of the bill. So…delayed again.
• May 31, 2019: Finally our amendments have been incorporate and printed – our bill is now SB 586B.
  • It is now 71 pages, largely because of our marina abandoned property changes – which is a necessary component to our bill!
  • We were able to lear up some of the funding issues that had arisen.
• June 10, 2019: The Ways and Means Transportation and Economic Development Subcommittee recommended passage of our bill to the Full Ways and Means Committee, with another amendment, the Dash-B5 amendment. This amendment simply adds some additional expenditure authority to OHCS’ budget to reflect the programs in our bill. Chuck Carpenter and John VanLandingham were present. There was no discussion of the substance of our bill. The vote was unanimous.
• June 14, 2019: The Full Ways and Means Committee, after a brief presentation from Senator Manning, the co-chair of our TED (Transportation and Economic Development) Subcommittee, also passed our bill, with only two dissenters, Sens. Girod and Thompson. (The vote was 18 to 2 in favor.) There was no discussion or questions. (Keep in mind that the committee worked through more than 50 bills in two hours that day, and they had just spent 20 frustrating minutes discussing whether a bill requiring more “wing space” for chickens used by Oregon egg producers would interfere with egg buyers in Oregon cities bordering other states.) Chuck and John VanLandingham again were present. We can only guess that Sens. Girod and Thompson, two conservative Rs, voted “no” because they heard, in the summary of our bill, language about raising taxes (that would be the annual $10 special assessment) on floating homeowners. If true, what is ironic about this is that they may have voted against floating home owners having to pay $10 so that we can ACCESS services and resources far-more VALUABLE than that AND WHICH we currently cannot access! Those of you who participated in the floating home owner tenant meetings last year can attest that the perceived VALUE of what we will get in return for this $10/year is well worth the investment. In any case, we had enough votes that it passed.

NEXT STEPS:

1. The bill will now be reprinted as C-engrossed, with the addition of the Dash-B5 amendment (bill printing can cause unexpected delays so we are hoping this goes smoothly).
2. After its official reprinting to incorporate all amendments, our bill will go to the House floor for a vote were it is expected to pass.
3. Once the House passes it, the bill will go back to the Senate floor for concurrence on the House amendments where we don’t anticipate any issues, other than the clock.
4. Once the Senate passes it,, Governor Kate Brown will, hopefully, sign it into law.

FINGERS CROSSED EVERYONE – THIS TIMELINE IS TIGHT!!

Even though the legislative session does not officially end until June 30, 2019, rumor has it that the legislative leadership hopes to end the session by June 21 – and everybody is frantic about funding and bills dying without being heard. 

Our MH Coalition leadership is doing everything in their power to make sure the bill can clear these hurdles in time. They, too, have 2 years of work at stake.

There is nothing we can personally do other than send positive vibes, prayers, good juju, whatever you believe in – send rainbows and unicorn thoughts!!

I’ll keep you posted as soon as we have news to report.