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The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously approved a $15 million grant program to fund the relocation of residents of a dilapidated mobile home park in eastern Riverside County to affordable housing units, or properties where they can resituate their existing trailers.
The Oasis Mobile Home Park Housing Opportunities Program, or “OHOP,” will be managed by the county’s Housing & Workforce Solutions Department.
The agency, utilizing funds allocated by the California Department of Housing & Community Development as part of the state’s 2021-22 fiscal year budget, will make up to $100,000 in grants available per household for the placement of Oasis residents in alternative dwellings or on trailer park lots away from Oasis Mobile Home Park in Thermal.
The county would assume responsibility for securing the new confines, provided applicants are qualified and building, health and safety standards are met. Recipients of the grant aid would not have any repayment obligations.
“The eligible uses of the (state) grant, include … the pre-development, development, acquisition (and) rehabilitation of rental housing that is affordable to extremely low-, very low-, low- or moderate-income households, including necessary operating subsidies,” according to a resolution establishing OHOP.
The goal is “securing improved housing (for park residents) either by transporting their current home to a permitted location, purchasing a home in a permitted location, purchasing vacant land to move their existing or new mobile home, or using the funds toward a down payment of a single-family home,” according to the Housing & Workforce Solutions Department.
Only residents who occupied trailers at Oasis prior to Oct. 26, 2021 — when the county received the grant — will be eligible for the money. County officials, coordinating with nonprofit groups, are conducting outreach campaigns at the park.
In the last three years, more than 350 people from 72 households have been relocated, according to officials. Over 200 trailers remain occupied at the site, located on 60 acres in the 88-700 block of Avenue 70, within the Torres-Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian Tribe’s reservation.
The board in January signed off on a compact with the tribe to work on preventing repopulation of the park through enforcement measures, including the demolition of some unoccupied trailers.
The park has been a fixture of controversy for years, most recently due to high levels of arsenic in drinking water, resulting in three emergency administrative orders issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency between 2019 and 2021, barring use of the underground reservoir there.
That led to ongoing relief operations to supply inhabitants with potable water via bottles and other imported means.
Under the agreement with the tribe, county agencies have authority to take regulatory action on so-called “fee lands” within the reservation, which comprise the park space. In 2021, the board approved a policy under which fee lands — typically parcels that tribes have sold off to private interests but remain under tribal purview — can be serviced and regulated by county agencies.
Along with arsenic, the park has contended with trash overflows and infrastructure deficiencies.
In addition to the state’s $30 million in grant aid, another $6.25 million in federal grants was made available, as well as almost $8 million in state Project Homekey funding.
In the past, park owners have charged $600 to rent individual mobile homes, plus utilities, officials said. During Tuesday’s board hearing, it was revealed that rents recently have gone up $100 per month throughout the park.
The facility has no state or federal business permits, although the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs has reportedly attempted to enforce some authority over its operation in the last decade, without success.
The park bears similarities to the Desert Mobile Home Park, better known as “Duroville,” that was also on Torres-Martinez land.
That facility, which was at the time replete with electrical and water deficiencies, was the subject of federal civil action that concluded in 2009 and culminated in the park going into receivership, out of tribal control. Four years later, it was permanently shut down.
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