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For the past eight years, a manufactured home park in Tucson has been overcharging its residents for water by hundreds of dollars. But that practice ended this summer when the Arizona attorney general stepped in as part of a broader investigation into submetering practices in mobile home parks.

Now Skyline Real Estate, the company that runs Desert Haven Mobile Home Park in Tucson near I-10 and Miracle Mile, will credit residents with the money they overpaid. For some residents, that’s more than $1,000. 

“Mobile home residents in Arizona should pay the correct amount they owe for utilities and not a penny more,” Attorney General Kris Mayes said in a statement Thursday. 

Residents in master meter parks are at the mercy of an antiquated utility system with a history of overcharging problems and a legal system that leaves some of the state’s most vulnerable residents with few avenues for redress, and can lead to them losing their homes.

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. 

Tucson-based organizers have spent the past year raising the alarm on utility overcharging in mobile home parks, including at several Skyline Real Estate properties, while Arizona Luminaria has been reporting on heat and utility issues in manufactured home parks. 

Raye Winch, an organizer with Poder Casas Móviles, said they are grateful the attorney general’s office has stepped up when so many other systems failed to hold park owners accountable for mischarging on utilities. That includes eviction courts that evict people despite evidence of fraudulent utility bills.  

“We celebrate that the Attorney General’s Office is willing to stand up and use their power. We also need judges at other levels of this process to actually look at the utility bills and read them and make sure they are accurate before saying that residents have to pay or be evicted,” Winch said. 

Skyline Real Estate, a company with its corporate headquarters in California, owns more than 60 mobile home parks across the United States, with at least 10 others in the Tucson area. 

At Flowing Wells Mobile Gardens, another Skyline-owned park in Tucson, more than 35 residents saw skyrocketing electricity bills last year but weren’t able to find a path to resolve the issue. One resident was evicted over the unpaid, but likely mischarged, bills. 

Last fall, Poder Casas Móviles coordinated a meeting between Tucson City Council member Kevin Dahl and mobile home residents struggling with high utility bills. In December, residents met with state regulators at Valencia Library. And in March, a group of residents attended a housing justice forum held in Tucson by Attorney General Kris Mayes.

This month, Mayes has taken several active steps to address utility issues in manufactured home parks. She sued a Tucson mobile home park for failing to inform residents that the electrical system in the park was “extremely dangerous, unreliable, and overloaded.” 

Her office also issued a consumer alert on utility overbilling in mobile home parks. 

With these actions, all mobile home park operators should be on call, said Mayes. 

“Mobile home park operators and any other landlords that submeter utilities are on notice to bill correct amounts to their tenants or my office will hold you accountable,” the statement Thursday said. 

More Arizona Luminaria reporting

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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...