FRESNO, Calif. — Sheets of paper that read, “This property is not abandoned,” were taped in windows and on the sides of the mobile home that Lynn Harbin owned for the past 34 years near Yosemite National Park.
It was a last ditch-effort to save it after she was told to remove or surrender her home to the National Park Service earlier this year without compensation. The bulldozers sent to destroy it last month paid little heed to her notices as they demolished her home and others in the El Portal Trailer Park.
“Don’t forget, they never evicted us,” said her son, Luke Harbin. “They shut off my power and threatened us with imprisonment.”
Around a dozen homeowners in the El Portal Trailer Park were forced out because Yosemite is concerned about the safety of power lines there that the Park Service owns and because the agency has other plans for the site.
Yosemite leaders initially gave homeowners there just three months’ notice to leave, despite having decided 10 months earlier that they would remove the residents in 2022, according to documents obtained by The Fresno Bee through a Freedom of Information Act request. Those Park Service communications also show decades of neglect to electrical infrastructure in the trailer park.
Yosemite has jurisdiction over land in rural El Portal, a small community located outside the national park in an administrative area along Highway 140, but Yosemite doesn’t own many of the homes there. That didn’t stop the Park Service from demolishing some after terminating lease agreements for pads beneath the homes. Since September, nine homes have been “removed,” Yosemite officials said in an emailed statement Thursday night, and “the abandoned, unclaimed property is trucked to the Mariposa County landfill in accordance with local regulations.” Four homes remain in the trailer park, also called the trailer court. Removals are scheduled to resume in January, weather permitting.
Luke Harbin said there’s no words to describe how angry he was upon finding his childhood home in rubble last month. His mother, a longtime Yosemite worker, now lives in a small rented dorm room in Yosemite Valley.
“Somebody should be getting arrested right now, but who am I going to call, the National Park Service?” Luke Harbin said of how he feels about the destruction of their home. “Because that’s the only law enforcement that actually matters up here, and they all work for the superintendent. They can say otherwise, but she’s their boss at the end of the day.”
NPS planned to remove residents months before they were told
Communications from Park Service leaders obtained via The Fresno Bee’s FOIA request show a decision to remove the El Portal residents was made after a tour of the trailer park in February 2021 — not that fall, as letters to residents later said.
The National Park Service shared more than 1,000 pages of documents and emails, many with redactions, in response to The Bee’s request asking for all communications related to the trailer park since the start of 2020.
One of those documents: “In February 2021, park staff, including representatives from the Superintendent’s office, Strategic Planning and Project Management, Administration, and Facilities reviewed onsite conditions of the trailer court’s electric system,” reads part of a briefing paper written in August 2021 by Yosemite’s then-utilities branch chief, Rick Hall. “The outcome of that meeting was a park decision to operate the trailer court as normal for the FY21 (fiscal year 2021) summer season and to close the trailer court prior to the following season.”
In early March 2021, Hall wrote to five Yosemite leaders, including Yosemite Superintendent Cicely Muldoon, “to summarize our discussions to capture the paths forward.” Hall wrote Yosemite would operate the trailer court “as normal” that season, remove hazard trees as quickly as possible to increase safety, and then “vacate all residents” in 2022 so construction could start in fiscal year 2023 on 40 RV sites to “support use” in fiscal year 2024. The last bullet point about the trailer park in that email: “Future conversations necessary to identify timing, nature of communications, etc.”
Eight months later, in October 2021, residents received their first letters from Yosemite about the trailer park, which simply cautioned them that the overhead electrical system was found to be in “very poor condition” and that it would be further assessed.
“We are committed to providing as much lead time as we can in the event that we need to terminate housing agreements and request tenants to relocate,” Muldoon wrote in the letter to residents.
Many of the longtime Yosemite workers had lived in the trailer park for decades.
“We are not requesting tenants to vacate housing at this time,” the letter continued. “This letter serves only as a notice about the conditions of the Trailer Court’s electrical distribution system. There is no immediate required action, other than to avoid any actions that may risk further degradation to power lines and poles.”
The October 2021 letter promised at least 60-day notices “if requisite repairs are not feasible, particularly in the context of the NPS’ long-term plan for the site,” to turn it into a public and administrative-use campground for recreational vehicles, with campground construction slated to begin in 2024. Residents interviewed by The Bee said that was the first time they heard of the 2024 date. An earlier plan to close the trailer park in 2000 was vacated because of a lack of funding. No new deadline to leave was given until last year.
It came in a Dec. 13 letter also signed by Muldoon, titled “NOTICE OF TERMINATION,” that gave the El Portal residents 90 days to leave. Some were initially given just 60 days. Yosemite terminated the leases for the pads beneath their homes in March and forbid them from continuing to live there. Yosemite turned off electricity to their homes a couple days after they were forced to leave. They were then given until June 30 to remove their belongings, but not to live there. Yosemite officials said the “abandoned property was inventoried and retained” for an additional 60 days, when residents had another opportunity to claim items, before the “formal process for unclaimed abandoned property” was started in September.
Yosemite’s letters to El Portal residents over the past year — along with the Park Service’s messaging to the media, inquiring politicians, and concerned members of the public — made it seem like Yosemite just learned of serious electrical infrastructure issues in the trailer park last fall.
“In the fall of 2021, condition assessments performed by park staff, a third-party contractor, and PG&E revealed a severely deteriorated overhead electrical system at the trailer court,” Yosemite officials reiterated again this week in an emailed statement to The Bee. “Assessing the safety risks that its continued operation posed to the people living there, the National Park Service made the difficult decision to close the trailer court housing area ahead of the 2022 dry/fire season.”
Yet residents were allowed to remain in the trailer park during the 2021 dry season, months after Yosemite leaders decided to close it down due to electrical issues, according to the obtained emails and documents. Those records paint a grim picture of degrading conditions in the trailer park.
“There have been multiple fires and short circuits caused by the degraded and hazardous customer connections,” Hall told Barney Riley, Yosemite’s chief of facilities, in his August 2021 briefing paper about the trailer park.
One of the fires was started because of circuit protection issues: “the NPS system does not have adequate protection installed to disable power during failures.”
“If a line is struck or goes down, protection should terminate the flow of electricity through the failed conductor. Unfortunately, NPS protection does not perform this task (one example,” Hall continued, “when a power line was severed with a section lying on the ground, power continued to run through the conductor — power was not automatically turned off by protection. This created an electrocution risk and started a small fire).”
Electrical issues there were already in plain view by early 2020, when the Park Service explored adding more housing in the trailer park for employees of Yosemite’s concessionaire. Hall wrote that the proposal didn’t move forward because it required a “full overhead electric distribution system replacement.”
His statement acknowledged that “over the past couple of decades, very limited electric repairs/improvements have been made in the trailer court (due to lack of staffing, compliance approvals, funding, etc.).”
Trees and vegetation in the trailer park were also posing “significant fire risk.”
“PG&E and regulatory agencies have clearing standards — we are not in conformance,” Hall added bluntly.
Other electrical issues addressed include conductors missing insulation, which “increases the possibility of fire causing incidents and electrocution,” and concerns about whether power poles could collapse under the weight of their loads. These wooden poles “suffer from woodpecker damage, weathering, and age.”
Hall said Park Service staff developed three options to address the issues: either repair the system overhead (costing approximately $1.3 million) or underground (roughly $7 million), or discontinue electric service. He recommended the underground option as the best way to continue long-term service and said “temporary measures could be employed by residents during construction.” The briefing paper ends by asking “division/park leadership” to identify the path forward.
The next month, in September 2021, Paul Laymon of Laymon Electric based in Mariposa was contracted by Yosemite to provide another condition assessment of the trailer park.
“The NPS owned overhead distribution system was completed in April 1960,” Laymon wrote in his report after touring the site, “other than some corrective maintenance or storm damage repairs it has largely been untouched since then.”
There is “little evidence” that much maintenance had occurred in the trailer park aside from vegetation management, Laymon added, who also reported seeing many safety concerns. He said his observations were based on visual inspection only because no maintenance records were available.
“The condition of the NPS overhead electrical system at the El Portal Trailer Court is in very poor condition,” Laymon concluded. “The system is well beyond it’s safe and useful life, exacerbated by the lack of consistent maintenance. To reduce risk and eliminate both the electrical and fire hazards the system should undergo immediate rehabilitation. Consideration should also be given to deenergizing the system until some of the most degraded components can be replaced.”
The trailer park residents were paying Yosemite for electricity and expected the same level of service as other customers. The issues in the trailer park persisted as Yosemite was installing a major new power line around them with PG&E that stretched from El Portal to Yosemite Valley, funded by the Great American Outdoors Act of 2020.
The displaced moved into rented dorm rooms in Yosemite Valley earlier this year or had to leave the Yosemite area. They thought the Park Service would have given them more than a three-month notice. State law requires at least a one-year notice when a mobile home park is being converted.
The residents also expected some compensation for the homes they owned and moving costs. Some interviewed for this story tried to get more information about what happened by filing FOIA requests of their own, but said they have not received responses from Yosemite.
“The National Park Service found no applicable legal authority through which former tenants could be provided financial compensation for the closure of the trailer court and the termination of their government housing assignment agreements,” Yosemite officials told The Fresno Bee again this week. “There has been no litigation regarding the El Portal Trailer Court.”
A GoFundMe created by the displaced residents to pay for legal services to help them has raised slightly more than $6,400 of a $100,000 goal. There’s also a change.org petition against evictions at the trailer court that’s picked up more than 3,200 signatures.
The displaced residents find it hard to believe that Yosemite — which has multimillion-dollar construction projects underway now funded by the Great American Outdoors Act — doesn’t have money to spare to help them after they were ousted from their longtime homes. One of the latest big Yosemite projects is a $31.6 million renovation of The Ahwahnee hotel.
The need for construction staging areas and temporary camping for construction workers was also cited by Yosemite during a December interview with The Bee as among the reasons the El Portal residents were forced to leave when they did. The Park Service later said they “misspoke” about that. Now this week, Yosemite officials told The Bee that “in coming years, the site may be used to support major park construction projects.”
The displaced residents think they should qualify for relocation benefits under federal law, given that Yosemite plans to use the trailer park site for a federally funded campground project. Yosemite was “in the process of pursuing funding” for that project earlier this year.
Yosemite officials didn’t provide a new timeline for construction there, but said last week that the site is not currently being used. The Park Service will repair electrical infrastructure before turning it into a campground, Yosemite officials said, but planning and design for that work hasn’t been completed. Officials said a contractor might be used to do it, but one hasn’t been selected.
After the El Portal residents were forced from their homes in March, some suffered serious medical issues; Toni Covington, a longtime homeowner in the trailer park, died of hypertensive cardiovascular disease a few days after she had to move into a rented dorm room in Yosemite Valley.
After she died, two of her children signed over her home to the Park Service to avoid any potential legal action from Yosemite. Moving the aging mobile home wasn’t an option because of steep costs, narrow roads and limited time. Covington’s home is reportedly among those that were recently destroyed.
“It doesn’t surprise me that a cascading effect of bad decisions keeps happening here,” one of her sons, Adam Covington, said of Yosemite. “I’m just really frustrated that I’m caught in it and that my mother was caught in it. ... I feel so bad because what a terrible way to pass away, days after getting kicked out of your home of 30 years.”
The pain of the displacements is still fresh for Terri Nishimura, another longtime trailer park resident who moved to Mariposa this year. She doesn’t want to be angry anymore, but she is. It’s an extreme and consuming anger.
“It’s terrible,” Nishimura said. “I think that’s taken a toll on us. It’s just hard to get over.”
