October 9, 2005
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Article Last Updated: 10/09/2005 07:39 AM
Lawsuit seeks to halt lake makeover. Mobile home owners seek injunction to keep vacation trailers on Berryessa's lakeshore
By Douglas Fischer, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
The fight over Lake Berryessa's future is taking a detour through federal court, with the recent filing of a lawsuit by two mobile home owners renting prime lake-front spots from the federal government.
The government wants the 79 mobile homes at Pleasure Cove Marina off the lake's shore by year-end and is voiding the month-to-month leases that have allowed them there since the 1950s.
Two renters, Oscar and Andrea Braun of San Mateo County, have owned their trailers for six years and say the government has no right to evict them and other "permittees."
It's a small part of a larger effort by the Bureau of Reclamation, which built the reservoir 50 years ago and owns the lakeand land, to revamp the shoreline. But it's a crucial one, as the legal fight could clarify just what rights the mobile home owners have as the bureau attempts to open the coveted spots to other users.
The agency's blueprint, still in the making, calls for many of the 1,200 long-term mobile home sites dotting the lake to be converted over time into RV spots, camp sites and rental cabins to attract a more varied and short-term crowd.
That has caused considerable consternation among the mobile-home set, some of whom can trace generations of family visits to the popular Napa County lake, a 90-minute drive from the Bay Area.
"Before someone tells you to abandon your property, they better have a pretty good legal reason," said Oscar Braun. "The route the bureau has taken has given us no choice but file this action before the district court. The question is quite simple: By what authority do they do this?"
At first blush, the permittees appear to have little legal standing. Their contracts run month-to-month and are with the private concessionaires running the seven resorts ringing the reservoir, not the government.
The concessionaires lease land under their resorts from the government under long-term contracts that start expiring in 2008.
For Pleasure Cove, where the Brauns have their vacation trailers, the government's agreement with concessionaire Forever Resorts requires the mobile homes be gone by year's end. The Arizona-based company intends to comply, said spokeswoman Darla Cook on Friday.
The Brauns insist the law is on their side. The mobile home phase-out, Braun said, is akin to an investor buying a rent-controlled apartment building and evicting the tenants to convert the units to condominiums.
The Bureau of Reclamation declined to comment on Braun's litigation. Regarding Napa County's authority, agency spokesman Jeff McCracken said this: "It's federal property. The federal government has authority to manage the property as it sees fit."
Not that Napa County would necessarily agree with the Brauns, either. In a 2004 letter commenting on still-ongoing efforts to reshape the lake, Napa County supervisors endorsed the bureau's effort to push the trailers off the lakeshore.
Those pushing for change see little chance of the Braun lawsuit delaying Berryessa's makeover. "Just because you don't like what the government is trying to do, doesn't give you the right to sue," said Carol Kunze, executive director of Berryessa Trails and Conservation. "Frankly ... I see this as really being irrelevant."
More information about the bureau's Visitor Services Planning effort can be found on the Web at http://www.usbr.gov/mp/berryessa/. Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com