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With some Arizona mobile home residents facing eviction over disputed utility bills, Attorney General Kris Mayes on Friday issued a consumer alert warning parks against illegal overcharges and explaining how residents can protect themselves. 

“When parks misrepresent the tenants’ actual usage, omit critical meter information, or deceive tenants about the appropriate rate structure, they do so at their own peril,” said Attorney General Kris Mayes, reminding all mobile home parks that they have specific billing-related obligations under Arizona law. 

In master-meter parks, the utility company owns a meter that measures usage for the entire park, while meters stationed at individual mobile homes and often owned by the park itself measure the usage of individual homes.

Under a process called sub-metering, the manager is then responsible for dividing billing for each individual manufactured home based on readings from the stand-alone meters.

Unlike a direct customer of the utility, residents in master meter parks have no access to direct customer service support from utilities, and must rely on their landlord or park manager to resolve the dispute. 

The stakes are high because parks can take a resident to eviction court if utility charges are billed as part of their rent. 

“If they were a customer directly with the utility, you couldn’t get evicted over a high water bill,” said Raye Winch, an organizer with Poder Casas Móviles, a group of mobile home residents and housing advocates. “A lot of people end up paying bills that they know are incorrect that are hundreds of dollars a month higher because they don’t want to lose their homes.” 

Over the past year, Arizona Luminaria has covered the experience of manufactured home residents around Pima County, from one park’s tragedy during an electricity outage to the impacts of a broken utility bill system, a data analysis of high heat death rates in manufactured homes and resident organizing efforts around outage safety. 

That work has coincided with an increase in organizing efforts in Pima County —including to address the impact of high or fraudulent utility bills on manufactured home residents. 

Earlier this week, Mayes sent a cease and desist letter to a south side Tucson mobile home park ordering the company to restore power and AC to residents, one of the first public instances of Mayes’ office stepping into a mobile home-related dispute. 

Friday’s communication makes several suggestions for how residents who own their homes but rent land in master meter mobile home parks can protect themselves from unusually high utility bills: 

  • Understand how your meter works, including what unit of measurement it uses, and document those readings in case you need evidence to dispute your bill 
  • By law, park’s billing statements must include the opening and closing meter readings and the dates of the meter readings for each billing period and the cost of the utility charges. Residents should ensure they are receiving an itemized bill with that information, and look for excessive charges
  • Residents who have concerns about high bills should put their complaint in writing to their landlord, file a petition with the Arizona Department of Housing or contact the Attorney General’s office in Phoenix at (602) 542-5763, in Tucson at (520) 628-6648, or outside the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas at (800) 352-8431.

Read the attorney general’s full list of advice here

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Yana Kunichoff is a reporter, documentary producer and Report For America corps member based in Tucson. She covers community resilience in Southern Arizona. Previously, she covered education for The Arizona...