The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Flin Flon trailer court residents have a sinking feeling after city council cut off funding to stabilize mobile homes that sit atop mushy muskeg. More than 50 mobile-home owners have signed a petition calling on the city to resume free delivery of fill used to elevate their homes above swamp water. 'Our trailers are always sinking at least two inches every year,' Ray Rowe, one of the petitioners, told council at their meeting Tuesday. 'It sinks all the time, so you have to keep building up above the water.' Since trailer court residents do not own their land, instead leasing it from the city, Rowe argued that delivery of fill is a municipal responsibility. 'We are the renters and (you) are the landlord,' he told council. Many trailer court residents also see unfairness in the fact that if they spend their own money for fill, the appreciated cost of the property ultimately benefits the city, not them. In its 2013 budget, the city quietly ended its years-old practice of delivering free dirt and limestone to trailer court residents. They had been able to phone the city any time they needed fill. The total cost of fill deliveries to the trailer court averages about $15,000 a year, but only a portion of that amount relates to residents who specifically request fill. Coun. Colleen McKee said the passage of time made it difficult for her to recall a specific reason for the decision to end the deliveries. But Coun. McKee, chair of the city's Finance Committee, said she believed it was likely seen as a cost-cutting measure. 'You try to garner all the information that you can (when making decisions),' she added. 'But one thing I did not realize is that (the fill) was meant for stabilizing your trailer in marsh.' See 'Council' on pg. Continued from pg. Mayor George Fontaine said council would discuss the matter further, leaving the door open to a possible reinstatement of fill deliveries. Even without having to buy their own fill, Rowe said trailer court residents have faced sharply rising costs in recent years. That includes a separate fee for water, a cost that used to be part of mobile-home owners' $120 monthly lot rental fee. But Mayor Fontaine disagreed when Rowe argued that trailer court residents were now paying as much as high-end homeowners on Dadson Row. The trailer court petition, signed by 52 residents, also calls on the city to enforce its noise bylaw on a particular property in the subdivision. The petition further states that petitioners 'do not approve of individual lots being cluttered up with non licensed automobiles, quads, dirt bikes, snowmobiles, motor-cycles and derelict parts' as is said to be occurring on one property. The city is to also investigate this concern.
