Water cut off to trailer park after property managers don’t pay bill

Published 8:57 pm Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Residents at Cahaba Park West trailer park had their water cut off Monday, and they don’t know when or if it will ever be turned back on. They’re also being told they have to leave the park.

Emily Jackson, who lives there with her mother, Denise, and her 5-year-old son, Jamie, said there have been water issues at the park for the last year, but now there is no running water at all.

“It’s got us to the point we’re sick because we’re used to running water where we can go take a hot bath, and we’re able to cook,” Jackson said Wednesday. “We can’t do any of that now.”

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Instead of just turning the faucet on and water coming out, they are getting water from a bulk water tank sitting on a trailer in their yard and bringing it in one bucket at a time to cook, clean, bathe and perform other tasks.

Denise Jackson said the issues started around a year ago with discolored water. She said the trailer park owners said they would fix the problem and told residents they were putting in new water lines, but the work was never completed.

“They said they were going to put some pipes down so each one of us could have our own water meter, but they didn’t do that,” Denise said. “They stopped working and just left us just like this. They just threw us away.”

Residents at the park have also been without garbage pickup, as well as other services that used to be provided, such as lawn care, according to Denise.

She said she has lived at Cahaba Park West since 2005, and over the last year she has been paying $250 each month to a bank account at Regions Bank for her rent.

Emily said they aren’t sure where the money goes or who it goes to.

“They don’t tell us who the check is going to or anything like that,” Emily said. “All we know is we drop the money off to a bank account, and then it’s gone.”

According to Dallas County land records, the park is owned by ICSunshine LLC. Business entity records from the Alabama Secretary of State’s Office show the company is located in Ontario, Canada and is registered to Wai Ning Fong.

Multiple attempts to reach the management company, Red Lighthouse Management Company, were not returned Wednesday.

Robert Allen, chairman of the Selma Water and Sewer Board, said they had no other choice but to cut the water off at the trailer park because of an unpaid bill for an extended period of time.

Allen could not go into details on how long the bill had been unpaid or how much they were owed.

“We are under a bond covenant not to give free water, and we have to stay within that covenant because we have to answer to the bond trustees and also the bond holders, the investors,” he said. “We’re only allotted a certain amount of time until we have no other choice but to discontinue service.”

Allen said board members are supposed to speak to a representative from the management company on Friday to discuss the issue.

Emily and Denise don’t know when they will get running water again, but they hope a solution is found, so they can get back to living a normal life.

“I’m not trying to gain anything. All I want is just water. That’s it,” Emily said. “The money they have taken from us … keep the money. We don’t care. Just turn our water back on.”