Residents of East Hampton Village Manufactured Home Community, a mobile home park on Oakview Highway, held a second meeting to address ongoing issues in the community on Aug. 7 at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
While an earlier meeting in July addressed residents’ most immediate concern — frequent and long-lasting electrical outages — the follow-up last week addressed issues with septic tanks, roads, and general safety, in addition to the electrical issues. It was led by Minerva Perez, the executive director of Organizacion Latino-Americana of the East End (OLA).
“The town should care about us because we are the working people,” said Paola Castro, a six-year resident of the community. Ms. Castro, who has two young children with her husband, Jhonny Castillo, plans to graduate from nursing school at Adelphi University later this year.
“The rich people love us because we’re working for the rich people,” said Mr. Castillo, echoing his wife in a conversation at their home.
Prior to the meeting, many residents had received a notice from R.H.P. Properties, the Michigan company that owns the property and rents the plots of land to tenants, offering a $300 rent credit for losses incurred during the most recent widespread outage, which lasted around four days in mid-July. Isolated outages have been reported by residents since then.
“LIPA is responsible for all construction, maintenance, and repair of the main electrical distribution lines in the community,” the R.H.P. president, Joel Brown, said in an emailed statement. “However, to ease any inconvenience that East Hampton Village residents may have experienced due to the interruption in service from the LIPA line, we have offered residents a rent credit.”
“Why is it now they’re deciding to do this?” Carlene McCoy Douglas, a 14-year resident of the community, asked of the $300 rent credit. “Now, we’re speaking out, right?”
“Since last time, it’s been on and off,” Lucia Martinez, another resident, said of the electrical service. Yet another resident, Sandra Gutama, said she lost power all day on Aug. 3.
Additionally, East Hampton Town conducted an electrical report between the mid-July outage and the Aug. 7 meeting that was then presented to R.H.P. Properties.
“There were several code violations present which are contributing to the heating and overloading condition that currently exists,” the report stated, concluding that certain systems are “not properly wired, not properly grounded, and overloaded.”
In the end, it recommended replacing the electrical distribution network and restricting “use of certain appliances” in individual homes, which place a greater load on the network.
“Upon being notified of the power outages at the Oakview Manufactured Home Park, the town contacted the property owner and retained an electrical underwriter to investigate the situation with the fire marshal,” the town said in a statement. “With power now restored the town is engaging with park management to permanently resolve the issues recently faced by the residents.”
“We’re here because we believe in community and we do not like bullies,” said Ms. Perez, at the start of the meeting, which was conducted bilingually with the help of a Spanish interpreter.
At the meeting, Ms. Perez urged tenants to avoid division within the community, and then launched the first of three tasks she planned for participants to complete. Ms. Perez asked residents to write their two most pressing concerns about living in the mobile home community on a Post-it note.
For Paula Lazo, a 12-year resident of the park who works as a teaching assistant in the East Hampton School District, it was electricity and cesspools. She said she had her septic system back up into her shower last year, a problem reportedly encountered by other residents as well.
For Ms. Castro it was electricity and safety for kids. Her husband, Mr. Castillo, mentioned roads and electricity on his note.
Residents placed the Post-it notes on a wall, where Jeison Pinilla, OLA’s crisis counselor, recorded the responses.
“My main concern is my kids,” Ms. Castro said later, “especially my daughter.” Ms. Castro and Mr. Castillo said their rent recently increased from around $1,200 to $1,300. At the mobile home park, tenants pay rent for the land and property maintenance, but own their homes.
Next, Ms. Perez asked residents to identify two benefits of sticking together as a community. “Being heard” and “having a voice,” one note read. “Standing with each other no matter what race you are” and “the power of collective action,” read two others.
Lastly, she asked them to identify two “beautiful visions” for the community.
“You should be happy coming home,” resident Annie Barbetta said aloud while thinking of her vision for the community.
Ms. Castro wrote down “beautiful roads.” “Live like people, not like animals,” Ms. Lazo wrote in Spanish, which is her first language. “Enjoying my home without feeling anxiety when it rains or is too hot,” another read. Two young children wrote “playground” and “pool” on separate notes with accompanying drawings. Many adults echoed this request.
Ms. Perez invited Courtney Spellman from Nassau Suffolk Law Services to provide legal insights at the meeting. Ms. Spellman addressed “scare tactics,” explaining to residents some of the legal nuances of tenants’ rights, particularly regarding eviction procedures. During the meeting, Ms. Perez held up red eviction notices that some residents had received.
“Any landlord has the right to evict,” Ms. Perez said over the phone after the meeting. “But how you evict and why you evict are extremely important. And those eviction notices happening right after people complained about having no power for four days is completely suspect as being retaliatory and that is absolutely against the law.”
Some of the eviction notices, Ms. Perez said, stem from issues that occurred in May. When the original incidents occurred, R.H.P. Properties gave the residents 10 days to resolve the problem.
“If you just look at the timeline, nothing happened until after this power outage in July and these folks complained,” Ms. Perez said. Since R.H.P. Properties began the eviction proceedings “after the person complained, what else can you think?” she added later.
“While a few residents currently have open infractions to address, there are no pending lease terminations and we vehemently deny any resident is being retaliated against for expressing concerns,” Mr. Brown said in the email statement.
Toward the end of the meeting, Ms. Spellman discussed specific tenants’ rights, including freedom from “unreasonable” rules, the right to only one rent increase per year, and a phone number for complaints.
As for the responsibility for the outages, PSEG stated that the wiring is “consumer owned,” while the transformers are owned by PSEG. The issue, Ms. Perez said, stems from a problem with the “primary cable,” which reportedly is the responsibility of R.H.P. Properties. Work on that cable was set to begin on Wednesday, according to R.H.P. Properties.
“We recently received required documentation from the owner that will now allow us to replace the old customer-owned facilities and energize new PSEG-Long Island facilities throughout the neighborhood, which should address reliability and outage issues in the future,” Elizabeth Flagler, a PSEG representative, said in an email last week.
“R.H.P. is sort of misrepresenting the reality, which is that they have the responsibility,” Ms. Perez said over the phone, adding later, “They still want to hang onto this idea that none of this was their fault, but it was.”
Since the July outage, OLA has been in communication with PSEG about the outages. Ms. Perez also notified the regional representative for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office about the issue.
R.H.P. Properties held a “productive meeting” with town officials last week, and the company said it is “working closely” with the town to address potential future repairs.
“Communication and respect and transparency should be part of this process going forward,” Ms. Perez said to the group. After the July outage, OLA mailed claim forms to R.H.P. Properties. The claim forms listed the losses residents incurred due to the outages.
At the next meeting, Ms. Perez hopes to provide clarity to the residents, stating over the phone that she wants to bring in representatives from East Hampton Town and PSEG to help the community better understand the situation.
