The mobile home park owner says city permits still needed; some residents are fed up with daily pumping, dust and mud.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
Some Paradise Cove residents are voicing complaints about chewed-up streets, dust and mud as a sewer installation project that started two years ago seemingly continues without end.
Residents say the half-finished project has meant torn-up streets that are muddy in the rain, dusty the rest of the time and cause respiratory illness.
“The management here can care less about the health of the residents,” said Ken Dahlquist, who said his wife is ill with a chronic cough that he blames on dust from the project.
But the landlord said he is doing the best he can.
“It’s extremely difficult to put a sewer system into an existing mobile home park with the density that we have here,” said park manager Steve Dahlberg.
The Kissel Company, owner of Malibu’s only ocean-side mobile home park, is in the midst of replacing dozens of 35-year-old septic tanks with a centralized sewage treatment plant, under a promised completion date of August last year.
The company made that promise in 2000 to residents, ocean users and the city of Malibu in a complex agreement that will allow the company to raise rents beyond the cost of living in the park. Current residents who pay about $700 a month in rent for their mobile home spaces will see their rent increase by up to 50 percent when the sewage plant is done.
But park owners said they are frustrated that the third construction phase has been put off after high bids required the redesign of key components. That, Dahlberg said, means the city must approve new plans.
“Admittedly, a portion of the delay was driven by the Kissel Company, because we were confronted with original bids that topped $4.1 million,” Dahlberg said. “Since the residents would be responsible for anything over $2.1 million, we felt it in the tenants’ best interests that we go back and see if the project could be built cheaper.”
That redesign, Dahlberg said, reduced the cost to $2.6 million.
“A lot of the delays were very worthwhile to the residents,” he said.
But it also meant that city plan review had to be delayed, and then redone.
“The plans were submitted in February of Ã04, and I don’t think anyone [was] thinking that we would be here sitting in February of ’06, still waiting for permits,” Dahlberg said.
City officials were unavailable for comment, but a few park residents said they are very unhappy.
Another park resident, Paul Akaka, said the construction project has been prone to errors by inexperienced workmen, who cracked his mobile home’s sewer pipe when installing new connections.
Tenant Dahlquist said the mixture of gravel and dirt that makes up a small portion of the street in front of his house is making people sick. He said several cars have gotten stuck in the unpaved trench cuts, which turn soupy when it rains.
One lingering source of disgust is the daily septic pumping truck making the rounds, draining effluent from the existing tanks 365 days per year.
But other park residents said they were merely inconvenienced, not angered, by the project.
“I’m not going to point fingers, but it would be nice for them to just pave over it,” said Joe Leogrande, as he washed off the outside of his coach last week. “But they just say they have to wait until everything is done before they do that.”
But the trench cuts can’t be repaved, because the third phase of the project will include removing old septic tanks, which are under the park’s streets. And that project is waiting on the city permits, Dahlberg said.
“Until then, we’re doing what we can, putting road mix gravel in the dirt and packing it down,” Dahlberg said. “We told the residents a while ago that they would be living in the middle of a construction project for a few years.”