Fairfield council wants to see improvements at manufactured home park

FAIRFIELD — The Fairfield City Council approved a conditional permit for Leisure Living Estates during its meeting Monday, but has asked the owner of the trailer park to clean up several nuisances in the next three months.

Leisure Living Estates is a trailer park, or manufactured home park, on the west edge of Fairfield that is owned by Don Davis of rural Mt. Pleasant. In March 2022, Fairfield City Administrator Aaron Kooiker sent a letter to Davis indicating that the city had received complaints about the lots at Davis’s trailer park.

“On the majority of these lots, you will see dilapidated trailer homes, some of which do not even appear to be occupied, junk and debris scattered all over the lots, including bags of trash, lawn mowers, random furniture, etc.,” read the letter from Kooiker.

Kooiker told The Union Thursday that the problems he outlined in his March 2022 letter to Davis are still present, and said there appeared to be no improvement.

The council approved a permit for Leisure Living Estates on the condition that Davis clean up the nuisances by April 24, when the council will review the permit again. In a letter that was part of the city council’s informational packet for Monday’s meeting, the city listed six lots at the park as “abandoned trailer homes,” in violation of the city’s code outlawing unsafe buildings, and 25 lots that were in violation of other nuisance ordinances.

Davis said he has owned Leisure Living Estates for 40 years, and that the park has 54 manufactured homes. The homes are owner-occupied, and Davis said that he enforces rules that every homeowner must follow.

“I want it to look nice and to keep it clean,” Davis told The Union. “I don’t want the junky ones any more than anybody else.”

Davis said he feels the problems at the park are minor, the kind of general clean up that must be done every spring.

“There’s not an abundance of abandoned cars, because we don’t allow that,” he said.

On the issue of some of the homes being abandoned, Davis said sometimes the homes’ residents are in transit, or they’re staying at another property. He said if a manufactured home really is abandoned, he gets someone to move it out of the park.

“I try to keep them all occupied,” he said.

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com