ILWACO — New owners of the Beacon RV Park, who are in the midst of a tense dispute with the park’s tenants, bring with them a lengthy list of complaints from previous business dealings in the region.

Deer Point Meadows Investments, a Vancouver-based corporation, took ownership of the park in April and are leasing the property from the Port of Ilwaco. The company, owned by Michael and Denise Werner, owns and operates RV Inn Style Resorts, which has more than a dozen resort RV locations in the Pacific Northwest.

At Beacon RV Park, tenants allege the new owners are trying to push them out of the park much quicker than state law allows, and that conditions at the park have gotten worse since they took over. The new ownership contends that the situation at the RV park doesn’t fall under the purview of Washington’s Manufactured/Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act, and that they need to vacate the park in order to allow rehabilitative construction work to begin in order to comply with the lease they have with the port.

Since the dispute began back in February, when the new owners first told the park’s tenants that they had to vacate the property by late March, 10 related consumer complaints have been filed against Beacon RV Park to the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Before then, the Ilwaco park had no known complaints filed against it with the attorney general’s office.

But complaints are nothing new for the Werners, whose businesses — namely manufactured, mobile home and RV parks — have faced a number of accusations from tenants elsewhere in the region.

Rent increases

In October 2019, the Columbian reported on the Werners’ purchase of Cascade Park Estates in 2015, a 55-and-older manufactured home community in Vancouver where tenants own their home but rent the land it sits on. In 2015, one complaint was filed with the attorney general’s office. At the time the story was published, 41 had been filed in 2019 alone.

Many of the complaints at the manufactured home park revolved around steep rent increases since the Werners took over the park, with tenants saying their rent had gone up 70% in less than five years and that it was much higher than any other park in the area. Tenants also complained about what they said was a lack of maintenance at the park, according to records obtained by the Columbian.

Sharp increases in rent and other accusations have been a common complaint that tenants have made at parks that have been operated by the Werners in recent years. In 2018, The Daily News in Longview reported that tenants in three Cowlitz County parks owned by the Werners said they were driving up rent, issuing unjustified eviction notices and bullying and profiting off of low-income senior citizen residents.

The Columbian also reported on four other instances where the Werners had purchased a park and steeply raised the rent on tenants — including one occasion where the attorney general’s office halted a planned rent hike because it hadn’t been a year since the last increase.

In December 2020, the Columbian reported on another planned rent hike — $95, for a monthly rate of $945 — at Cascade Park Estates at the beginning of 2021 or as soon as Washington’s moratorium on evictions and rent increases had expired.

At the time, Gov. Jay Inslee’s emergency proclamation placed a moratorium on rent increases, although it included an amendment that allows manufactured or mobile home park owners to issue notices of rent increases so long as the increase occurs after the moratorium ends. But the owners are required to give a 90-day notice, which Cascade Park Estates residents had not received.

After receiving dozens of complaints, the attorney general’s office sent the Werners a letter asking them to rescind their notice to increase rent because it violated the governor’s proclamation. Mark Passannante, the Werners’ attorney, told the attorney general’s office that the notice had been issued before the amendment in question had been added to the proclamation.

Lawsuit

In 2017, The Chief in Clatskanie reported that the Werners had been sued by a husband and wife that had been hired to monitor water quality at two mobile home parks the Werners owned in Columbia County in Oregon.

In November 2016, Heather and Michael Culp filed a lawsuit in Columbia County Circuit Court claiming they were wrongfully terminated by the Werners for raising complaints about alleged falsified water quality test results. They asked for the court to award more than $50,000 in lost wages and $400,000 in damages.

The Culps said they were hired in 2015 to monitor water quality for about 375 mobile home park residents, as well as the occupants of 16-20 nearby residences. The Culps are state-certified water system operators, and said in the lawsuit that their required duties include testing for E. coli and other bacteria.

They claim that on Dec. 2, 2015, Heather Culp was prevented from performing tests at one of the mobile home parks they had been hired to monitor by the Werners after she discovered the locks on the wellhead had been changed. After informing Denise Werner that the test samples could not be collected, the Culps claimed that Werner demanded the testing equipment and documents be turned over to her so that she could “recruit an unauthorized and unlicensed person to collect and submit the samples under a false and fraudulent pretext.”

The Culps alleged in the lawsuit that the test results collected after Dec. 2 of 2015 tested positive for “bacteria that constituted a public health hazard,” and that preventing the testing had put public safety at risk.

The lawsuit was settled in October 2018 with undisclosed terms.