‘Substantial progress’ being made at Velladao Mobile Home Park,
say state housing department officials
Gilroy – It took $100,000 and a week of painting, picking up garbage and hacking away overgrown tree branches, but Thomas Velladao, a Marin tax accountant and owner of a ramshackle trailer park in south Gilroy, has managed to appease state housing officials.
A pair of inspectors from the California Department of Housing and Community Development drove onto shiny black asphalt Thursday as they pulled into Velladao Mobile Home Park, one month after the agency threatened the owner with the park’s closure and potential jail time. Inspectors reported that Velladao corrected nearly all of the 38 health and safety violations cited in the wake of a March sewage spill at the park.
The agency will spend next week reviewing a plan for a permanent fix to the sewer system, HCD spokeswoman Janet Huston said. She declined to comment on the nature of repairs before inspectors review a plumbing assessment of the system. She said, however, that Velladao is making “substantial progress in remedying the violations, and therefore there is no imminent threat that HCD will suspend the permit to operate as long as he continues to make reasonable and substantial progress.”
Velladao estimated that the total bill for an electrician, plumber and a contractor who re-paved the park’s cracked and pot-hole filled roads came to $100,000. The owner said he performed many repairs himself to save on costs.
“I painted the wash room, the fences. I weed-whacked weeds, cut all the tree branches. I took six dump runs – tires, an engine out of the back of the park,” Velladao said. “When the park residents saw me doing all that work, especially painting, I think five different trailers were painted unilaterally by the tenants.”
Velladao threatened eviction for a handful of tenants who, by late June, had not yet fixed broken windows, repaired spliced electrical wires or torn down illegal shacks. State officials planned to hold Velladao responsible not only for the park’s roads and sewers, but also for the condition of each of the 25 trailers in the park, tucked out of view near the corner of Luchessa Avenue and Monterey Road.
Velladao said Thursday that tenants had fixed their trailers and would not be evicted.
The park came under heightened state scrutiny after a pair of women complained to the Dispatch in mid-March, following a week of failed attempts to get park management to clean raw sewage pooling outside their trailers. Frustrated with the pace of park-wide repairs following the sewage spill, state officials issued a final compliance order to Velladao at the beginning of June. The move is the last step before HCD officials, who retain jurisdiction over the park as a transportation facility, hand the matter over to county prosecutors.
“I’ve fixed every single thing on the list except for the plumbing,” Velladao said Thursday. “It’s up to them to decide what they want me to do (with the sewers) and they’re going to get back to me next week.”
The owner, a Gilroy native who now lives in Petaluma, called himself the park’s new “handyman.” In the future, he said he plans to check on the site every two weeks.
