Dyan Norfleet had to dip into her savings to pay her August bill at Twin Palms, a north side Tucson mobile home park.
The total bill was more than $900, including $171 in electricity costs — the month before she had paid $777.21 for lot rent, house rent and utilities, according to bills shared with Arizona Luminaria. Norfleet’s home has a swamp cooler in one room and two fans.
“I had to think ‘cat food, how many cans this month?’” Norfleet said, as the kitten she’d taken in several weeks ago wound its way around her ankles.
Norfleet, 73, and her neighbor Aida Garcia, both renters in the park, said their summer electricity bills usually run $40-$50. On Garcia’s Aug. 1 bill she was charged $256.96 just for electricity.
Nine miles south, following the spine of Interstate 10, Liliana Salmon did a double take the day she saw the water charge on her Sept. 1 utility bill: $2,105.05.
Salmon got the high bill amid another dispute with the park management at Plaza Del Sol, which she says called animal control last spring when her service dog barked at a member of the security team who approached the porch. Salmon went to court with the park after the dog dispute, and they came to a legal settlement, but were still debating with her attorney how much she was expected to pay in attorney’s fees, according to Salmon and a legal document shared with Luminaria.
The bill came at a hard time — Salmon’s job cleaning houses had dwindled to just a few clients and she and her husband are raising three kids. On Sept. 10, Salmon was issued a seven-day notice of non-payment of rent.
“I feel sick, I don’t sleep. It’s hard for me to close my eyes,” said Salmon, sitting in her parent’s quiet backyard. “Living like this is not OK.”
At Flowing Wells Mobile Gardens, a park next door to Norfleet and Garcia at Twin Palms, several residents received electricity bills in summer 2024 that were more than five times their summer average. They were shocked, and with the help of local organizers took their case to a state level administrative court.
What all three locations have in common is that the park charges residents directly for some or all utility bills.
Most parks who submeter bills use a master meter system. Under that process, the utility company owns a meter that measures usage for the entire park, while meters stationed at individual mobile homes — and usually owned by the park itself — measure the usage of individual homes. Management then bills each resident, sometimes with the help of a third party billing service.
For residents, that means that unlike a direct customer of the utility, they have no direct line to the power or water company and few options to address unusually high bills before the next rent payment is due. Residents in master meter parks must rely on their landlord or park manager to resolve the dispute.
It’s a dynamic that advocates say is unfair to the often elderly and low-income residents of mobile home parks, putting the onus on them to challenge a utility overcharge through avenues that often take longer than the time before the next bill is due.
“Legally there is not much they can do,” Skyler Clary, an attorney with Southern Arizona Legal Aid, told Arizona Luminaria.
Back in 2019, high utility bills were also part of what helped spur mobile home residents to organize into the group that has now become Poder Casas Móviles. “High utility bills are extremely common in mobile home parks,” organizer Raye Winch said. “One of the first things that was brought up was residents having $500 water bills.”
Earlier this year the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners supported several bills that would have changed how manufactured home parks bill for utilities, and what residents can do if they feel they have been overcharged, but none of those efforts made it into law.
Kath Noble, president of the association, said she gets calls on a monthly basis about utility bills that residents believe are incorrect.
COARE Communities, which the Pima County assessor’s office lists as the mailing address for Twin Palms MHP LLC, said the property manager’s team had reviewed the utility charges and found no indication that residents were incorrectly or fraudulently charged.
“The property manager takes resident billing questions seriously,” Kimberly Stepchinski, the southwest regional manager for COARE Communities, told Arizona Luminaria when asked about Norfleet’s and Garcia’s bills.
A high bill could be caused by changes in usage, or a change in how the local utility calculates rates, Stepchinski said. “A significant increase from one month to another does not, by itself, indicate that a charge was calculated incorrectly.”
Tucson Electric Power communications manager Joe Barrios said there has been no rate increase that would have affected electricity costs at Twin Palms, and that TEP doesn’t have any insight into how the park charges tenants for electric service.
Norfleet and Garcia’s experience highlights two dynamics that continue to play out in manufactured home parks.
First, residents whose utilities are submetered say they are confused and see few options for support that move quickly when rent is due. Second, those residents are also working to hold on to their housing at the bottom rung of the economic ladder, being able to pay rent but finding that an unexpected $200 cost pushes them to dig into their savings or to ask relatives or friends for support.
After a career as a social worker, Norfleet has begun looking for a job to help cushion the financial blow of the bills as well as an 8% lot rent increase that took effect in August. “I have to go back to work to stay here,” she said.
Growing attention
Attention to residents’ utility troubles has grown in recent years, driven by on-the-ground organizing, legal action by Attorney General Kris Mayes against several manufactured home park owners and ongoing news coverage.
Unusually high utility bills were enough of an issue in the summer of 2025 that Mayes’ office issued a consumer alert in response to an increasing number of complaints, warning parks that they must include the opening and closing meter readings and the cost of utility charges in residents’ billing statements.
“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,” Mayes said in the alert.
Norfleet and Garcia both submitted complaints to the attorney general’s office this summer, as well as raising their concerns to the property manager. But they also paid their bills, knowing that neither of them had an immediate option for where else to live if they faced eviction proceedings for not paying utilities — collected as part of their rent.
“That was money people needed to live on,” Norfleet said. “You can’t get blood out of a turnip, and I do need to eat.”
At Plaza Del Sol, residents also often ended up paying their bill. Maria Collantes, who had lived in the park since 2017, received a $1,750.76 water bill in May, according to a copy reviewed by Arizona Luminaria. Park maintenance told her she must have a leak, but she said there was nothing that could have made her bill jump from the $45.23 she paid in April.
Hoping to avoid eviction, she paid it with support from Poder Casas Móviles. “Honestly, they take advantage of people here,” Collantes said of the park.
When contacted for comment by phone, a staff member at Plaza Del Sol named Ron answered the phone and said every resident had their own water meter and electric meter and were billed independently through a third party service. “We can only charge what Tucson Electric and Tucson Water can charge,” Ron said.
Salmon spoke about her experience at the Sept. 22 city council meeting, calling for an investigation before she was asked to pay thousands of dollars for a water bill. “I am asking: who is responsible for ensuring the residents of the mobile home parks are billed accurately and fairly for their water usage?”
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero told Salmon to contact the attorney general’s office for support.
Salmon, who has an attorney, believes the high bill was a bad meter reading. She is now waiting to hear from the park to determine next steps.
Winch, of Poder Casas Móviles, pointed to the process that a direct Tucson Water customer would go through as a model.
On the bill adjustment portion of its website, Tucson Water says customers can request adjustments due to leaks, vandalism or other occurrences. A customer would be eligible for a bill adjustment if they met several conditions, including that the water level went down to normal.
“Tucson Water is an excellent public utility,” Winch said, who said the utility has a clear process to address leaks and high bills.
In a statement to Luminaria, Tucson Water confirmed that Plaza Del Sol received Tucson Water through master meters that measure water to the park’s property line, but no farther. Resident bills were not issued by Tucson Water, but the company had previously performed audits for residents at the park and made recommendations.
Owners and renters have different options
People who own their manufactured homes but rent the land are covered under the Arizona Mobile Home Landlord-Tenant Act. If they have a dispute with their park, they can file a petition to the Arizona Department of Housing for $50.
The department then helps set up a hearing before a judge with the Office of Administrative Hearings. Salmon falls under this category.
Residents who rent their home in addition to the lot are not eligible for that assistance because their relationship with the park owner is governed by the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, the state law that applies to apartment residents and other renters, according to the Arizona Department of Housing.
The other three residents featured in the story, Collantes, Norfleet and Garcia, fall under this law, so they would not qualify for an administrative hearing facilitated through a Department of Housing complaint.
In the section about utility bills, the residential law says landlords can charge separately for utilities by submetering or ratio billing — dividing the total usage of a building or area and charging each tenant a portion of that. If the landlord uses ratio billing, they must describe the method they’re using.
If a tenant believes a landlord is charging more than would allow for the recovery of utility charges plus an administrative fee, a tenant is instructed to object to the bill in writing, and then file a civil complaint in justice court. The Pima County Consolidated Justice Court’s website explains how to file a civil complaint.
The relationships between park managers and residents can already be complicated or strained, making addressing a high bill difficult. At Twin Palms, residents have raised concerns about broken laundry machines and disputes over who was responsible for lawn care on a rented lot.
At Plaza Del Sol, residents said they had issues with park staff over fence requirements, or were pressured to pay for maintenance of the area’s palm trees they felt were management’s responsibility.
Noble says her organization, the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners, and partners like Wildfire, an Arizona-based anti-poverty group, are gearing up to put forward efforts at legislative change again next session around utility bills and both landlord-tenant acts, with more knowledge about what could make it into law.
Clary, with Southern Arizona Legal Aid, wants to see a law that would protect tenants when a utility meter breaks and causes misreadings.
Among the legislative changes that Poder Casas Móviles wants to see are laws that require functional submeters that are tested, greater transparency in submetered utility charges, and prohibiting evictions based on contested utility charges.
Assistance
Mobile home residents who need assistance with high utility bills can contact Poder Casas Móviles at 520-525-5110 or podercasasmoviles@gmail.com and file a complaint with the Attorney General Kris Mayes’ Tucson Office at (520) 628-6504
Residents can check to see if they qualify for PRICE assistance by looking at this map, and apply for assistance through this website for mobile homes in Tucson and this website for homes outside Tucson and in Pima County.
Residents can contact the city’s PRICE grant team directly by emailing PRICE@tucsonaz.gov
They also want contested bills to be put on hold while an administrative law judge reviews a dispute. “If a bill is under dispute, someone should not be at risk of losing their home in that process,” Winch said.
At Flowing Wells Mobile Gardens, residents fared a variety of ways as they fought their high electricity charge: some faced evictions, others looked to move out amid the stress of the process. Because they owned their homes in the park, they were able to have their case eventually heard by an administrative judge, who did find that some residents’ meter readings were inaccurate but could not act.
“The Administrative Law Judge has no jurisdiction to award the damages that were alleged by Petitioners as to the alleged overcharges,” the ruling found in 2025. “Therefore, based on the foregoing, the Administrative Law Judge concludes that Petitioner’s Petition should be dismissed.”
This year, residents at both Twin Palms and Plaza Del Sol are eligible for support that could include home repairs and eviction support under new mobile home federal grant funds because both parks are in the PRICE grant’s target area.
Keeping notes can help
Al Retherford has lived in his mobile home in Sunrise RV Resort in Apache Junction since 2012. The park bills him for water, sewer and trash, all of which had appeared on his bill at reasonable rates until the spring of 2026, when he received a bill showing he had used a little more than 300,000 gallons of water in a little over a month, at the cost of around $1,845.
Retherford, who is the Pinal County director for the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home Owners, went to management, who said he must have a water leak. But for the past three years, he had been taking daily photos of his meter that have a date and time stamp. After showing management those numbers, Retherford said, the high bill was corrected.
A member of the management team at Sunrise RV Resort who declined to share their name said the park flags unusually high utility bill rates to double check them. They often end up being typos, they said.
“It’s gotten out of control,” Retherford said. “We need to have better regulations regarding utility charges.”
Retherford followed the protocol that advocates say best protects mobile home residents: keeping their own notes of utility usage, including meter readings, where possible.
Noble suggests residents keep all of their bills, keep track of what they pay and take readings with photo documentation at least once or twice a month. “You can’t do anything without documentation,” she says.
Still, says Noble, she sees that seniors or low-income residents, both of whom make up much of the population of Arizona’s mobile home parks, are sometimes reluctant to challenge park owners or managers. “Where are they going to go?” she says. “You always pay your bill — but what if the bill is wrong?”
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