A bill debated extensively in the House of Representatives that would establish a cap on rent increases at mobile home parks and empower the little-known Mobile Manufactured Home Advisory Council (MMHAC) to allow mobile park owners to exceed that cap came as a surprise to some advisory council members and revealed underlying tensions within the council, where mobile park owners feel they’re being undercut by their colleagues.

House Bill 5428 would set a rent cap for mobile park tenants at one percent over inflation. While that section of the bill has existed throughout the legislative process and received a public hearing in March, the latest amended version of the bill that was released on May 28 empowers the MMHAC to determine if a mobile park owner can exceed that cap.

Mobile home parks are regulated by the Department of Consumer Protection, and the MMHAC was created to monitor the implementation of laws and regulations and to generally promote mobile manufactured homes as affordable housing, according to the website. It is comprised of fourteen volunteers who meet quarterly and is supposed to be equally representative of mobile home park tenants and mobile home park owners. 

The MMHAC, which happened to have a meeting the same day the amendment was brought forward for debate in the House, was blindsided by the amended legislation, according to MMHAC chair Elizabeth Burdick, a town planner for Ledyard, who says the bill was never brought to the council to be discussed.

“There’s a lot of excuses going around as to why this didn’t happen,” Burdick said. “But it didn’t happen and that was disappointing to me.”

The legislation was spearheaded by Rep. Rebecca Martinez, D-Plainville, along with two MMHAC members – Raphael Podolsky, an attorney and policy advocate for Connecticut Legal Services, which works to prevent housing discrimination, unfair evictions, and promote affordable housing, and David Delohery, a mobile park home tenant.

Burdick says she had a brief conversation with Martinez roughly a week and a half before the amended bill was posted and put up for a vote in the House. At that point, Burdick hadn’t seen the bill language but registered her personal disapproval with the idea, saying it would distort the mission of the council, changing it from an advisory council to an approving body.

“The legislators never sent it to the attention of the council as a whole,” Burdick said. “I can tell you I was personally not in favor of it, not because of added responsibility to the MMHAC but the purpose of the council is to be equally represented with a certain number of park owners and a certain number of park residents and I felt that this really messed with the equilibrium.”

“Equal representation on the council promotes cooperative discussion,” Burdick said, noting that their May 28 meeting was not attended by any of the park owners. “It has been a challenge for many years to get the council to work together to promote housing in a positive way and I think the bill will impact any progress toward that goal and not in a good way.”

Council member and mobile park owner Mark Asnes says that following passage of 2023 legislation giving mobile park tenants the right of first refusal when an owner wanted to sell their property, it was decided among council members “that nobody would bring any legislation unless they brought it to the council first,” but that didn’t happen in this case.

“This bill was introduced on January 17, and we didn’t have any idea about the bill whatsoever and the next advisory council wasn’t until March, which was actually cancelled for lack of a quorum,” Asnes said. “[Podolksy and Delohery] never actually brought it to our attention, said that they were helping to write the bill and have it introduced in January. We had no idea that this was happening.”

Asnes and his fellow mobile park owners are against the bill for a variety of reasons, not least of which are the rent caps which he says will stifle any further mobile home development, but also because awarding the council the ability to override those rent caps could put them in the ethically problematic position of adjudicating matters in which they have a vested interest, whether directly or indirectly.

“If you have residents impacted by rent increases, how can they be impartial? I don’t know that I could be impartial unless I saw some kind of bad actor. Other than that, how am I going to vote against another community owner?” Asnes said. “Boards composed of tenants who reside in, or benefit from, regulated units create an inherent conflict of interest and the same goes for me. Isn’t it unusual that the people who put forth the rent cap law also want to be the ones who adjudicate it?”

Reached for comment, Podolsky says that he did have a hand in crafting the legislation but denies that there was any effort to keep the council in the dark — both he and other council members testified on it during a public hearing in March.

“This did not go through the council,” Podolsky said. “But they were very aware. They testified on the bill back in March, so I don’t think there’s any surprise there.”

Podolsky also says that the amended version of the bill was crafted in response to mobile park owners’ concerns that the rent caps were too strict, allowing the advisory council to override the cap when it’s necessary. Since the advisory council was an existing board made up of stakeholders, empowering them with the ability to override the cap seemed logical.

While Podolsky admits there was an understanding among council members to talk about proposals in advance that any of the tenants or park owners would bring to the legislature — with the understanding that not everyone would agree — he says the park owners haven’t been showing up for meetings and there was little room for agreement between owners and tenants on rent caps.

“This was an issue that seemed pretty clear that there was no room for agreement,” Podolsky said. “The process always works best when people are talking to each other and the advisory council in the past has been the vehicle for that, but you can’t skip the meetings.”

“This proved to be a very contentious issue and the opportunity to work through the council just didn’t happen,” Podolsky said.

HB 5428 may have proved too contentious for state lawmakers as well. The bill was pulled following four hours of debate during which Republicans grilled Martinez on the floor of the House, with Rep. Joe Zullo, R-East Haven, saying it was the “beginning of housing socialism.” With the final day of session just days away and major pieces of legislation, including the budget and a contentious energy bill, waiting in the wings, minority Republicans can talk bills to death or prevent them from being brought up in the first place with filibuster threats.

That could mean the legislative end of the proposed rent cap for mobile homes this year, but the rift within MMHAC will likely continue as the park owners appear to be pulling back, feeling that the council, more and more, is being used as a launch pad for legislation working against them — first through the right of first refusal legislation in 2023, and now rent caps.

“You pass the law for right of first refusal; the next year, without telling anybody, you introduce a law for rent caps, and elimination of fees, and this advisory council. As soon as rent caps pass, my asset drops in value exponentially,” Asnes said. “Now that the value of my asset is reduced, I’m forced to sell my business to the tenants because they just passed a law capping my rents. Tell me that’s not wrong at every level. They’re going to be able to take our communities at a discount.”

“The council has gone through a bit of a bumpy time these last six months, maybe driven in part over a disagreement over nothing the council is doing but the underlying dispute over the legislative issue itself where different stakeholders at the council want different things from the legislature,” Podolsky said. “I hope that maybe we can get the council back on a less contentious footing.”

“There was not one park owner at the meeting yesterday. You can see already the effect this bill is having on the equal representation on that council,” Burdick said. “It’s good for the owners and the residents to talk about things together and that didn’t happen here, and that’s disappointing for me.”

Rep. Martinez did not return request for comment.

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