Officials tell mobile home residents to form HOA
Assistant county attorney Rachel Wallace sits in the county law office. (photo:Ben Pounds )
The Operations Committee, a group which advises the main Anderson County Commission, discussed these concerns at its meeting Monday, Oct. 16.
It resolved to have Anderson County Mayor Terry Frank send a letter giving updates on the county’s codes enforcement efforts in the area and encouraging the residents create a homeowners’ association.
Pine Meadows is a mobile home community located in unincorporated Claxton, and includes 150 lots. The Operations Committee agenda lists “Ben’s Trailer Park” as an alternate name.
However, Anderson County Law Director Jay Yeager and assistant county attorney Rachel Wallace said Ben Graves only owns about 43 of the lots.
Wallace said the area dates to the 1960s, and was originally developed with its roads by Oak Ridge Development Company, which dissolved decades ago.
To this day, she said, the community’s landowners, not the county, own the trailer park’s roads. Wallace and Yeager said the roads’ private ownership prevents the county highway department from improving them.
“Our highway department would get fined if they put any of their equipment down there to try and fix anything,” Wallace said.
“They were built substandard to begin with,” Yeager told The Courier News. He said asphalt pieces float during heavy rain.
Wallace described the roads “degrading over several decades.”
County Commissioner Tracy Wandell at the meeting discussed sewer, electrical and codes issues in addition to the roads. He made the motion to have Frank send a letter to residents “letting them know that we’re going to take a real hard look at all the zoning issues at each property” and encouraging residents to form an HOA to solve issues such as roads.
Commissioner Robert McKamey seconded the motion. It passed unanimously.
“You have my word that I’m going to work on this as long as I can,” Wandell said.
“Regardless of who they are, what they do, they pay taxes,” he said. “To tell them there’s nothing we can do to me isn’t a good enough answer.”
Frank said the HOA would give residents “standing” to address issues.
Yeager was cautious about the benefits of an HOA, saying that there might be costs for the residents involved and difficulty getting everyone to sign on.
Unlike the roads, the county has intervened with the area’s sewer system, but only to a point.
Yeager said the county has hooked up the community to the CUB system, but can’t do anything about the sewer lines connecting individual mobile homes to the county’s lines.
Frank told the committee that Travis McKamey, the county’s new codes enforcement officer, was looking at issues in that neighborhood, but that hasn’t solved the road or other infrastructure issues.
She said the federal Housing and Urban Development department could help people move, in worst-case scenarios where infrastructure fails.
She also said she was looking to find the sites of overdoses or child abuse in Pine Meadows.
“We’re trying to, I guess, do the best we can,” she said.
One Pine Meadows resident who spoke at the meeting said she’d asked the state of Tennessee for a caution light on Edgemoor Road just outside the community.
“I was almost hit by a car yesterday,” she said. “We’ve got to do something to slow these cars down.” She added that children were playing in the streets.
She complimented the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office for “getting the druggies out of there,” but criticized people from elsewhere owning property in the subdivision and letting grass grow high, adding they should be fined. She said no one oversees picking up trash.
In response to Wallace, she said she did not believe residents should be responsible for the roads. She said Graves should be responsible or punished with a fine.
Another resident said the response time to 911 calls from Pine Meadows is too slow.
He said his niece spent 15 minutes giving a girl CPR while waiting for a sheriff’s deputy to show up.
“I can almost drive from one end of the county to the other in 15 minutes,” he said. “I know we’ve got deputies closer than this.
“There is nothing more precious in this universe than human life. My messiah died for it,” he said. “We need better, faster responses to 911 calls.
“Just because we are ghetto doesn’t mean that we are any less human.”