With an outstanding water bill of more than half a million dollars and a northern Illinois bank in charge of the properties, Kewanee’s four trailer parks present a challenge to city officials.
The best way to handle the situation, the City Council heard Monday, might be for the city to condemn the trailer parks and take ownership of them.
A bank in Sugar Grove holds the mortgage on the four parks — the former Southwind Mobile Estates, Reecy’s and Reecy’s West and a small park north of West Sixth Street near Baker Park — and owes the city a water bill that Mayor Gary Moore estimated now totals more than half a million dollars.
At the council’s last meeting a lawyer representing the bank offered to pay the city $100,000 on the water bill, but Moore rejected that idea Monday.
Moore said, “They (bank officials) made a bad business deal, plain and simple,” in taking over the trailer parks. “I’m not willing to accept a very small portion of that bill to appease that bank.”
Some of the residents are apparently paying the bank for their water, but the bank hasn’t forwarded any of that money to the city. “They’re using our money to fund their bank,” Councilman Chris Colomer said.
Moore said the city might have to take a drastic step: “We need to shut the water off. That’s my opinion.”
That would penalize the people who have been paying for their water, so the council heard a suggestion from a member of the audience.
Ron Lund, director of mission effectiveness and agency expansion for Project NOW, said his agency could do more for the residents if the city were to condemn the trailer park properties.
Lund said Project NOW could have a team in Kewanee this week to work on helping the residents find other places to live. The problem is finding those places. “We want to work with the renters first,” he said.
“I think if we had the housing stock, a lot of these people would live there” rather than in the trailer parks, City Manager Gary Bradley said.
Moore also said the trailer park properties had been appraised at a value of $910,000, and questioned whether the appraiser ever actually saw the properties.
The mayor said the appraiser may have been from the Chicago area, where real estate values are considerably higher than in Kewanee.
