A Sartell mobile home park is being sued by tenants who claim they have been exposed to raw sewage, overcharged for utilities, and forced to sign invalid leases.

Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid and Robins Kaplan LLP filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of four long-time residents against the current and former owners of the Sartell Manufactured Home Park.

The complaint alleges that the owners knowingly exposed residents to compromised water and operated faulty sewage systems that caused human excrement and other sewage to back into residents’ homes and leak onto residents’ lots, making the area uninhabitable.

The owners are mobile home park moguls David Reynolds and Frank Rolfe, who recently came to wider prominence in a segment on unscrupulous trailer park investors on HBO’s Tonight With John Oliver.

Some Sartell residents have complained about mold in their homes and health issues caused by sewage exposure.

Marci Knox, a resident at the mobile home park since 2017 and one of the plaintiffs in the suit, began encountering this issue three days after moving in.

“When I asked them to fix the raw sewage problem under my house, they blamed me and refused to pay for the repairs,” Knox said. “I was forced to spend my entire pandemic stimulus check cleaning up the filth just to make my house habitable.”

However, the sewage issue might have been an issue long before Knox moved in. When defendants Reynolds and Rolfe bought the park in 2014, an appraisal was done, and it discussed how the sewage system needed to be fixed.

When residents tried to band together to form a residents’ association, they claim they faced intimidation and eviction threats. The lawsuit states that when the threats didn’t work, the owners allegedly concocted a lie, telling residents that state law required them to re-sign their leases because the park was under new ownership, which was a different LLC that the two defendants owned .

The suit claims many of these residents were forced to sign these leases under duress and were not told that the new leases presented to them contained new, illegal, and more restrictive terms.

Legal Aid’s litigation director Justin Perl told Bring Me The News these leases would be legally void because there was no reason for these residents to sign a new contract while already having an active lease.

“The legislature didn’t require new leases to be signed if an existing lease was already in place,” Perl said. “We believe they were defrauded into those leases. There was no reason to sign those leases; they should be invalidated.”

The complaint further alleges that the owners installed utility meters under each home to charge each resident for the utilities they use. However, the suit claims the meters either do not work or the defendants were charged much higher than they should be.

According to the lawsuit, this is not an uncommon practice for Reynolds and Rolfe. They own and operate parks through corporate entities, including RV Horizons, Inc., Impact Communities, and Impact MHC Management, LLC. They also run “Mobile Home University,” a get-rich-quick course that allegedly suggests targeting low-income veterans, seniors, and people with disabilities.

“Just as a heartless person, the customers are stuck there. They don’t have any option. They cannot afford to move the trailer… they don’t have three grand,” Rolfe is heard saying in one of his MHU seminars , made public through the Last Week With John Oliver. “The only way they can object to your rent raises is to walk off and leave the trailer, in which case it becomes abandoned property, and you recycle it and put another person in it. So you really hold all the cards.”

Rolfe and Reynolds allegedly sold the park to another of their LLCs in 2016 despite residents attempting to band together to buy the land from them. The community negotiated a $1.5-million purchase dealbut it fell through because they lacked the resources necessary to obtain financing at that level.

The suit was filed on Tuesday, and court records show that Reynolds, Rolfe, and their companies have not responded yet. Perl hopes to push this case swiftly through the system, hoping for a trial by next year.

“For years, the defendants have exploited and preyed upon our clients and their neighbors in the park,” Perl said.

“These are elderly folks, veterans, disabled persons, and low-income families being squeezed out of a tight housing market. Enough is enough. We bring this class action to protect their rights, to get a responsible property manager appointed to maintain the Park according to this State’s laws, and to remove the current owners who do not care about the residents and their basic rights to health and safety.”

Legal Aid is asking the court to force the owners to fix these issues and award compensatory and punitive damages to the residents.

Bring Me The News has attempted to contact Reynolds, Rolfe, and their respective companies but has not received a response.

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