Interested parties voiced their concerns when city council unveiled three ordinances aimed at establishing health and safety regulations for mobile homes, manufactured homes, recreational vehicles and tents.
The council voted to give the ordinances a second reading at the next regular meeting and decided in the meantime to look into all the issues raised by members of the public and other councilors.
Mayor Dave Paulekas said the main goal of the regulations, which need some reworking, is to protect people looking for low-income housing.
“We’ve got slum housing,” he said. ”We’ve got someone making profits on that slum housing and we’ve got people making profits on the people that can least afford to pay for decent housing.”
The mayor said these regulations are not infringing on private property rights.
“What a person buys and what a person chooses to fix up or how they choose to live—I just don’t want to go there,” Paulekas said. “It’s not my place.”
Councilors Bryan Shuster and Joe Vitale disagreed and said these regulations could make otherwise cheap living solutions cost prohibitive.
“I’m just amazed we’re going onto private property and doing this,” Shuster said. “I’ve heard people say we have to keep them up to standards. But now we’ve raised rent $250 and now these people go ‘I can’t live here.’ Anytime you’re going to touch something and make an improvement, you’re going to make it worth more too.”
Members of the public asked for clearer, more consistent language in the ordinances and an allowance for mobile homes built before 1976, which, under the present language of the ordinances, cannot be brought up to meet standards.
Jim Shuster and his wife run a trailer park with four mobile homes in West Laramie.
“I have three of them that are ’76 and older and I’ve been rebuilding them for the last 25 years,” he said. “I feel threatened.”
The city attorney said he would take public comments into consideration in revising the three ordinances before their second reading August 18.
