Brunswick’s town councilors Monday voted to extend a temporary measure preventing mobile home park owners from raising lot rents for another 180 days. The vote comes as the town crafts an ordinance to address rent practices that park residents say are pricing them out of their homes.

There are more than 1,200 mobile home park lots in the town of Brunswick which are home to thousands of residents, most of whom fall at or below median income level, according to the town.

The council passed an initial 180-day moratorium in November after hearing from park residents about high costs of living and insufficient services.

In March, consultants hired by the town released the results of a study on Brunswick’s eight mobile home parks, concluding that residents are particularly vulnerable to rent increases and poor maintenance.

The report highlighted Bay Bridge Estates residents as having the highest level of financial stress among Brunswick’s park residents, and pointed to hidden fees as a significant burden.

The housing committee plans to bring a rent stabilization ordinance before the council in June to address high costs at mobile home parks, Sally Costello, the town’s economic and community development director, said Monday.

The committee heard from several residents and park landlords at a listening session on April 16.

At the session, representatives from Legacy Communities and Sun Communities, which own Bay Bridge Estates and Maplewood Manor/Merrymeeting Park, respectively, asked the committee to reconsider a draft ordinance.

The ownership companies argued that the ordinance would create administrative burdens by requiring landlords to go before a board when attempting to raise rents over a set cap and might result in delays to improvements and home construction at the parks. They also asked that a rent cap account for inflation and said the recent mobile home park study painted a misleading picture of park conditions.

Mobile home residents, however, continue to say that large ownership groups need to be held accountable for failing systems at parks, saying they’ve had issues with water supply, falling trees and neglected roads while their lot rents continued to increase.

The housing committee met again on April 29 to discuss several sticking points in the draft ordinance, including what the threshold will be for annual rent increases and if Brunswick’s resident-owned communities will be subject to the planned ordinance.

In a separate item Monday night, the council allowed the town to apply for a $500,000 community development block grant on behalf of Brunswick Bay Mobile Home Cooperative, one of the town’s resident-owned mobile home parks, to replace 16 failing septic systems dating back to the 1960s and ’70s.

Residents of mobile home parks across Maine have been pushing back against rent increases in the past few years, many of them fighting for moratoriums on increases and encouraging their towns to adopt stabilization ordinances. Several communities, including Old Orchard Beach and Waterville, have passed caps on annual rent increases, and other towns, including Arundel, are currently considering protections for residents.

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