Santa Maria RV park tenants get evicted
Dozens of people living at a popular RV park in Santa Maria will soon have to find another place to call home after receiving Notices to Vacate to make way for new development.
Tenants of the Santa Maria Pines Campground RV park have known for awhile they may be living on borrowed time.
A new Hampton Inn hotel is going in right next door on the corner of Preisker Drive and North Broadway and the City of Santa Maria is focused on improving the North Broadway area as a gateway to the city.
Notices to Vacate as early as next week have been sent to Santa Maria Pines tenants many of whom have nowhere else to go.
“All of these people have been trying to call places around, looking, and they were told they have nowhere to go”, says park tenant and resident manager Sharon Dugan, “they are really stressed out, they’re worried, they don’t know what to do at this point.”
“We have people from out of state coming here that have contracts to go to work here and they are depending on this place”, says park resident and former Campground employee Javier Paz, “I don’t know what they’re going to do but there isn’t any camping for these trailers available around the Central Coast, everything is booked up for months.”
Scott Burns says he and his wife, a traveling nurse, have called the Santa Maria Pines Campground home for the past few years saying they found it more convenient to live in an RV than in other housing options.
“Usually there’s 10 to 15 traveling nurses in this complex anywhere from Emergency Room people all the way up to the Pediatrics Unit which is where my wife is”, Burns says, “if we don’t have a place to stay, I’m not going to have her drive 30, 40 or 50 miles one way just to come here to work.”
The immediate future of the Santa Maria Pines Campground is unclear with phone calls to senior park management not returned Thursday night.
“They were telling us that there was a buyer for the park and it was the Teamsters Union and that they were going to tear this place down and they were going to build storage sheds”, Javier Paz said.
Park tenants know there’s not much they can do to stop their eviction and believe the Campground’s bucolic setting will also soon become a part of the past.
“My partner and I are going to be left homeless and without a job, and I’m stressed”, Javier Paz said.
“We won’t be back here next year, and neither will any of the other nurses that would usually come around here”, Scott Burns says, “the area is going to be at a loss.”
Paz says telephone and laundry facilities have already been cut off with the remaining utilities expected to cease leading up to eviction day next week.
