A lengthy saga between Marina mobile home residents and park owners will likely reach its final chapter with the closing words “to be continued.” After months of meetings, the Mobile Home Task Force found little common ground between park owners who wanted a long-term lease and homeowners who wanted a rent-stabilization ordinance.

“We’ve met for five months and accomplished very little,” said El Rancho Mobile Homes Park owner Marshall Reeves at an early October City Council meeting. The task force will meet one last time Wednesday, Oct. 14 (past the Weekly’s deadline).

Homeowner representatives will request that all parks adopt a memorandum of understanding that the owner of Lazy Wheel Mobile Home Park presented to its residents. The issue will then return to City Council Oct. 20.

The Lazy Wheel MOU calls for a 3 percent rent increase in January, with flat rents for the next three years, says Ruben Garcia, vice president of Waterhouse Management Corp. When homes change hands, rent increases can’t exceed 5 percent or the highest rent in the park, Garcia says, adding that pass-through costs for capital improvements have to be approved by the majority of homeowners.

“We are satisfied with that agreement for now,” says Cindy Virtue, president of the park’s homeowner’s association. “Hopefully that will tide us over until we get the city convinced that we need an ordinance.”

It’s been more than two years since mobile home residents asked the council to adopt a rent-control ordinance. After paying for two conflicting consultant reports, the council formed the task force in April to create a truce.

Sharon Attebury, president of the Cypress Square Mobile Homeowners Association, says property owners proposed a 10-year lease with annual rent increases aligned with the Consumer Price Index, plus steeper increases for El Rancho and Marina Del Mar, which have lower rents. “We didn’t ask what time the train was going to come everyday to run us over,” Attebury says. “That’s not stability.”

The quest for a uniform agreement for the city’s five mobile home parks fell apart last month when Garcia and Reeves left the table to draft their own MOUs. “I think we have received enough input in our meetings to address the needs of our mobile home park,” Garcia says.

Task force members say Reeves has been meeting with El Rancho residents one on one and pitching a new rental agreement. Reeves could not be reached by the Weekly’s deadline.

While there is support for Lazy Wheel’s agreement, it remains to be seen whether the other park owners will adopt something similar. If they do, the contentious tale will resume in 2014.