Sean C. Morgan
City officials have hit the brakes on a plan to evict the caretaker at Northside Park.
About 40 people attended a meeting at City Hall on June 20 to tell City Manager Ray Towry about the positive impact the caretaker has had in the park and their neighborhood. They asked him not to evict the caretaker.
Tina Lint is the official caretaker for Northside Park. She said she pays $200 in rent and works 20 hours per month. She lives in a trailer on the park and is assisted by her husband, Robert Lint.
“I want to thank you all for coming,” Robert Lint said to all of the neighbors at the meeting.
“We want to thank you for what you do,” said neighbor Gerritt Schaffer.
The issue began, Towry said, when the city notified the caretaker of the eviction after hearing a complaint about the caretaker’s park- model trailer – an RV designed for long-term occupancy. Northside Park is located at the intersection of 11th Avenue and Redwood Street.
Under the city’s nuisance codes, chapter 10.28.020A, no one can live in a recreational vehicle for more than seven days in a one-year period outside of a trailer park approved by the city. An RV may be used for up to seven days. After that, exceptions are available by permit for a limited number of additional days.
“I’m guessing everybody here wants to keep the caretakers,” Towry said early in the meeting. Most of the room vocally assented.
Multiple residents of the area described how much the park and neighborhood have improved over the past decade, and they put much of the credit on the caretaker keeping the park clean and keeping out the drugs and criminal elements.
They said they use the park, and they let their children use the park, something that many would not do with Sankey Park.
“They keep us all safer,” said one neighbor (Nattie Wallace?). “They have always been friendly, very helpful.”
Tammy Wade said she has lived in the neighborhood longer than most. She has seen drug dealing, fights, drinking, needles, transients sleeping in the park and a sex offender who, she said, hadn’t yet registered, disrobing and doing “nasty things.”
That was before the caretaker moved into Northside Park, she said. “Since they’ve been there, our neighborhood is safe again. They don’t just watch the park. They watch the community too.”
When her daughter was growing up in that area, Wade wouldn’t let her play in the park, she said.
“We lived a block away from it, and we weren’t even allowed to look that way,” said Brandy Wysong-Frick, Wade’s 38-year-old daughter. Now, Wysong-Frick said, she is happy to let her son play in the park.
Other neighbors said they moved to the area because the park had a caretaker that kept the facility clean and safe.
The park has changed a lot since the Lints moved to the park in 2009, neighbors said. The Lints came from Philomath, where Robert Lint was a caretaker in a city park for 10 years. Early on, he recalled seeing a woman come out of the bathroom with a needle sticking out of her leg.
He said something, and she pulled it out of her leg and threw it on the ground, he said. He picked it up.
Needles are much less common now, he said.
“I don’t let the riff-raff come in,” Robert Lint told The New Era. “We try to keep the family atmosphere. We try to do our best in here.
“When we started cleaning up, people started showing up.”
When the park is clean, it motivates the neighborhood, he said.
“Our whole neighborhood has changed,” said Bridget Schaffer, a neighbor, and it’s become a lot more comfortable for the remaining and the residents who have moved into the area.
Others echoed the comments.
Neighbor Dan Wallace asked how the city would compensate without the caretaker, whether the city would increase police patrols and hire extra parks staff to keep the park clean.
The Lints are doing a great job, he said, and he doesn’t see any reason to let them go.
“If they don’t have somebody in here, it’s going to go back to the way it was,” Robert Lint told The New Era. “I don’t want to see it that way.”
Resident Bill Davis said “it’s a simple matter of going to the City Council and changing the law. The City Council works for us.”
Towry said that the city isn’t firing Lint; and, in fact, he has been talking to them about increasing her hours.
“It has nothing to do with the quality of their work,” Towry said. “It has nothing to do with them or the job or who they are.”
But the city must follow its own rules, he said, and the trailer is not allowed under the nuisance code. “I think you have to lead by example.”
Northside is located in an R-1 residential low-density zone, in which dwellings are required to be 1,000 square feet or more in size and a nominal width of 28 feet, Towry said later. Residences are also required to have a foundation.
The caretaker’s home had been allowed by a conditional use permit, but after receiving a complaint about it, Towry said he didn’t believe it was exempted from the nuisance ordinance against living in recreational vehicles.
Towry said he also is concerned about liability since the Lints are dealing with criminal behavior, but aren’t trained to do so.
He told the residents that the city budget for 2017-18 will add a second full-time position to the parks. That position will be a crew leader, similar to the crew leader positions already in place for streets, water distribution and wastewater collections. Previously, the streets crew leader handled parks.
He told them that they shouldn’t sell themselves short.
“You guys as a community have done a lot through your Neighborhood Watch program,” Towry said.
Towry said he would put the eviction process on hold and consider different options.
This isn’t decided, Towry said. There is some wiggle room. “We invited you to come together so we could have a discussion. What I gave you were the issues. We made the initial decision.”
There are things the city can do to keep the Lints there, Towry said, but it requires a process.
He said he has taken phone calls from people who do not like the trailer in the park.
The council understands, Towry said, and the council “is committed to moving the community forward.”
The council has dedicated itself to making decisions that do the most good for the most people for the longest time, he said.
“We need to sit down and look at codes,” Towry said. “I can’t promise you that legally we’re going to come back with the answer you’re looking for, but we’re going to try.”
The city also has started the eviction process on tenants of the manufactured home in Sankey Park, which, Towry told Northside residents last week, was also in violation of a city code.
Sankey is in an R-2 zone, which requires a minimum residence size of 720 square feet and a nominal width of at least 24 feet.
The mobile home at Sankey meets those standards, he said. The problem is that people are living in a city park, which has been allowed under a city conditional use permit.
“The city made an exception for itself,” Towry said.