The owners of the Jeffco Estates mobile home community are suing Arnold, claiming the city is trying to force the park out of existence.
Lawsuits have been filed by Jeffco Estates MHC LCC in Jefferson County Circuit Court and the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Missouri challenging Arnold’s ordinance governing mobile home districts as unconstitutional.
“We have the gumption and the money to stand up to the town on not just behalf of us but the other 10 or 11 communities in the city of Arnold and the thousands of residents who own homes in these communities who are getting screwed over in the long term by this ordinance,” said Ryan Hotchkiss, CEO of Horizon Land Management, a Maryland-based company that bought Jeffco Estates in 2021 as part of a multi-mobile-home-park purchase.
“It is a horrible ordinance that is clearly drafted with the intent of slowly strangling mobile home parks out of existence,” Hotchkiss said. “Basically, it makes it impossible to ever put homes in the community.”
Jeffco Estates, at 654 Jeffco Boulevard in the northern part of the city near the Fox schools campus, has existed since 1968, four years before Arnold was incorporated as a city in 1972. According to the city’s website, the first ordinance establishing regulations for mobile home communities was established in 1972, and the ordinance has been updated five times, with the City Council approving the most recent change in July 2022.
Hotchkiss said Jeffco Estates, which has 150 lots for mobile homes, had 102 residents when his company purchased the park, but that number has since dropped to 95.
According to the lawsuits Horizon Land Management has filed against Arnold, new homes cannot be installed and existing homes cannot be renovated because of the city’s regulations, which will prevent the owners from continuing to use the property as a mobile home community.
Arnold City Administrator Bryan Richison said the city is not trying to force mobile homes out of Arnold.
“We still have a mobile home park zoning district,” he said. “Just like all of the other zoning districts, it has regulations that you have to meet. Just like all of the other zoning districts, if you are legally nonconforming, you are fine until you want to change something. When you want to change something, you have to conform.
“We have spoken with (Jeffco Estates owners) numerous times about how we will work with them if they put a plan together to reconfigure with new pads that meet all of the regulations. We will let people phase it in, because it is a lot to undertake at one time.”
Hotchkiss said the city’s regulations regarding mobile home communities make it virtually impossible for his company to add new homes or change existing mobile home pads in Jeffco Estates, and the city has not offered options for his company to come into compliance.
“If I could turn this park into a 120-site park out of 150 and fill it up, I would do that all day long. They won’t do that for us.”
Lawsuits
Jeffco Estates initially filed a lawsuit in the Jefferson County Circuit Court against Arnold in September 2022. The company filed another lawsuit in federal court against the city on March 6, the same day the Jeffco Estates lawyer voluntarily dismissed three counts in the Jefferson County court lawsuit that mirrored sections of the federal lawsuit.
“That was unexpected,” Richison said. “We were not expecting after they filed in Circuit Court for them to turn around and want to go to federal. I don’t know the legality of why they would want to do one over the other.”
Hotchkiss said his company wanted file the lawsuit only in federal court, but because the suit is challenging decisions made by Arnold’s Board of Adjustments, which rules on appeals of the city’s zoning code, it had to be filed in the Jefferson County Circuit Court.
A motion by attorney Allyson Sweeney, who represents Arnold along with her father, attorney Bob Sweeney, to dismiss the lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court was denied on Aug. 29.
A pre-trial conference is scheduled for Feb. 9, 2024, court records said.
Allyson Sweeney said Arnold has filed a motion to consolidate the cases in federal court, which has a trial date set for July 29, 2024. However, Sweeney said the city is filing motions to have the federal court case dismissed as well.
“Our position is if you are going to redesign the mobile home park, you need to come into compliance,” she said.
According to the federal court lawsuit, Jeffco Estates applied for five building permits starting in the fall 2021 through May 11, 2022, and the city denied all the applications. The company appealed those denials through the city’s Board of Adjustments, which denied the appeals on Aug. 25, 2022.
The lawsuit said the application denials for building permits at 2139 and 2163 Park Drive and 2163 Lake Drive “did not rely on lawful nonconformities.”
The suit also said the city denied the applications because city code that does not allow for a larger manufactured home to be placed on an existing concrete pad also does not allow for existing concrete pads to be enlarged or modified because of required setbacks to allow space between mobile homes and mobile homes and the road.
“We purposely and strategically picked multiple applications, and each one was denied,” Hotchkiss said. “They are not allowing any homes to come in, whether we reconfigure the park or not because every new home that comes into these parks is one new home further away from them getting rid of mobile home parks.”
The federal lawsuit also said Arnold issued a nuisance violation in September 2022 against a mobile home, saying it was condemned.
The suit claims the nuisance violation was in retaliation for the company challenging the building permits it was denied for other mobile homes.
“They don’t want quote unquote trailer parks in their backyard,” Hotchkiss said of Arnold, as well as some other cities. “Often, they want to get rid of them and have a higher, better use. Who doesn’t want a nice condominium complex there that has a higher tax base that looks nicer?”
The lawsuit also said a representative of Arnold reached out to the owners of Jeffco Estates in July 2022 to tell them a commercial developer was interested in buying the mobile home park.
Richison said he did not know if that happened.
“Any kind of offer for the property would be a private transaction that we wouldn’t be part of,” he said. “I can’t say for sure if it has happened because we wouldn’t know. It would make sense to me that somebody would be interested in turning that into some kind of commercial operation, given its location.”
The lawsuit also said the city contacted Jeffco Estates owners in July 2022 and asked them to provide Arnold with a list of residents who keep pets in their homes.
“I don’t really know what that is referring to,” Richison said. “I am not aware that we would ever ask that, what we would ask that for or what we would do with that information.”
The lawsuit asks Arnold to reverse its denials for building permits and allow new mobile homes to come into Jeffco Estates, and it seeks to recoup last profits, rent and business opportunities the owners said they suffered because of the city’s regulations.
Hotchkiss said the lawsuit is not about getting money from the city, adding that his company only wants to offer an affordable housing option in Arnold.
“I want to be able to continue to operate that park as a healthy park and give it a future,” Hotchkiss said. “These people (Jeffco Estate residents) have spent good money on their homes. They can’t sell their homes because the town will not approve certificates of occupancy. They are taking property away from lower income people. It is disgusting.”