A new receiver for the three Kewanee trailer parks has given city officials hope that the problems with the parks can be resolved.
At Monday’s City Council meeting, City Attorney Zachary Lessard reported on recent developments in the trailer park case, and the report was optimistic.
“Last week was exciting,” Lessard said. He said there was a court session in Cambridge with Ira Lauter, who has been the court-appointed receiver in the trailer park case since January.
“We prevailed,” Lessard said, but a judge wanted the two sides to work out an arrangement for going forward.
The two major issues in the trailer park case have been the condition of the parks and the trailers in them, and a backlog of unpaid water bills for trailer park residents that city officials say now exceeds half a million dollars.
Under Lauter, water bills have been collected from trailer park residents, and the city has been paid around $80,000, Lessard said.
He said a Michigan real estate firm that had initially been appointed as receiver in the case “sat on their hands” and didn’t do much to improve the parks or the water bill collections.
Lauter, Lessard said, “did more cleanup in three weeks” in the parks than the Michigan firm ever did. “There’s been some demonstration of commitment” on the part of Lauter, he added.
Trailer park residents “feel comfortable” about making water bill payments to Lauter, Lessard said.
While the city will be receiving the water payments from now on, council members have been adamant about not forgiving the half-million-dollar backlog of unpaid bills. A representative of a bank in Sugar Grove, Ill. that holds a mortgage on the trailer parks earlier asked the council to forgive all but $100,000 of that backlog, but the council didn’t like that idea.
“We’re not forgiving anything,” Lessard said Monday.
