What happened at the June 19 MH Coalition Meeting?

At the beginning of the meeting, they flipped the order of the agenda to accommodate a person who was presenting about submetering.  The result was that the first 2.5 hours of the MH Coalition meeting was spent on submetering of water and other utilities.   Most marinas that are represented by our group thus far are known to be on well water.  By law, a landlord cannot submeter well water so this doesn’t apply to broadly to our group.

However, we would desperately like to hear from any Floating Home Owners at rental moorages who obtain their water from a municipal source.  We suspect that some rental moorages on the Columbia River may be on city water and, perhaps, those in St. Helens.  So, if you are a floating home owner at a rental moorage and are on city water, this applies to you and we want to hear from you!!  Otherwise, we have no known issues with the submetering law and cannot improve it for you.

The good news is that the MH Coalition made progress on this topic and are getting closer to actual draft legislation language which means that we will spend less and less time talking about submetering. They also said that the next meetings will start with Dispute Resolution to give us an opportunity to make some real progress on that topic which is relevant to us.

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DISPUTE RESOLUTION

The final half-hour was devoted to Enforcement/Dispute Resolution.  There are a couple of key points to pass along:

1. The MH Coalition is removing the Enforcement aspect from this discussion for this legislative session in order to focus solely on the Dispute Resolution/Mediation aspect.
   • Background:
     • Enforcement was the original name given to this discussion.
     • Last year, Tenants requested a means to resolve issues when Landlords were clearly violating their ORS rights, yet did not require the Tenant to litigate in order to get the Landlord to stop the violations.
   • This is not exactly the best news to have it removed.  This means that, for now, Tenants will need to continue to cover the costs of litigation should they feel as though their rights are being violated by a Landlord.
   • The reason given to remove Enforcement from the discussion at this time is because:
     • It is widely understood that the nature of most of the issues between Landlords and Tenants can be resolved through legislation to require Landlords to participate in Mediation and Dispute Resolution.
     • Generally, most Landlords and Tenants agree that mediation and dispute resolution could be beneficial to both parties.  But, finding government funding for litigation help is a far trickier problem to solve.  In the interest of being able to draft meaningful legislation that might actually get passed in 2019, it is imperative that we simplify the issue or else no progress on any aspect of this issue will be made.
2. So, while mandatory mediation could help when you have certain issues with your Landlord (for example, perhaps you want to park an RV onsite temporarily and your marina Landlord won’t permit it), there are going to be issues that are not suitable for mediation either because they are too big or too controversial (for example, when a Landlord is violating your rights and refuses to stop).
3. The MH Coalition may add Enforcement back in for discussion in 2019.
4. IMPORTANT NOTE:  Currently, MCRC helps manufactured home tenants through voluntary mediation because of the $10 assessment they pay to fund the group.  Floating home tenants do not currently have access to the MCRC because we do not pay the $10 per year tax.  This is one of the key things we are trying to change at the Marina Subcommittee level.  We want access to this valuable resource!!  If we do get eligibility to use this resource in 2019, and if the MH Coalition can come to an agreement on mandatory mediation and get is also passed into law, then we will have a whole new set of tools to use to help protect our rights.