A new hitch in trailer park tale
A state legislator who owns and operates a problem-plagued Griswold trailer park with his mother is now facing foreclosure and receivership actions by a bank that would take the property away from them.
That’s all on top of a continuing state probe into allegations that Rep. Brian Lanoue, R-Griswold, and his mother, Suzanne Lanoue, ignored health and safety concerns, including a rotting tree that fell and crushed a mobile home unit while its owner was in it last year.
Complications continued to pile up on the Lanoues in recent days as the state Department of Consumer Protection was planning to resume hearings, begun in April, on whether they should face sanctions including possible revocation of their license to operate the 52-unit Country Mobile Estates trailer park at 1564 Glasgo Road, Route 201.
Lanoue, a first-term lawmaker, declined comment through a House Republicans spokesman Thursday. He referred questions to his attorney, Gary Cicchiello of Norwich, who could not be reached.
The DCP’s initial hearings into the park’s problems were postponed for six months to allow the Lanoues time to obtain bank refinancing and to negotiate a settlement with DCP — under which they would perform badly needed maintenance work, including tree trimming, and thereby get the state to cease its administrative proceedings against them.
However, the refinancing never came through, and neither did any settlement with DCP, so a resumed hearing was set for Thursday — except on Wednesday, Cicchiello requested, and was granted, still another postponement.
In his written request, Cicchiello said he’s been informed that the Lanoues’ bank plans to initiate a Superior Court foreclosure action — “because the [Lanoues] have defaulted on [their] mortgage” — and to ask a judge to appoint a “receiver” to collect rents and manage the property.
The bank — Eastern Connecticut Savings Bank of Norwich, to which the Lanoues owed $1.06 million as of a year ago — recently had its lawyers send letters to the park’s $415-a-month tenants, telling them that as of Nov. 15, they were no longer to pay rent to the Lanoues. Instead, they were instructed to send monthly rent checks to the bank, in care of its law firm, Geraghty & Bonnano of New London.
The letters referred any questions to attorney Michael Bonnano at the firm. Bonnano declined comment Thursday when contacted by Government Watch.
The Lanoues “now have neither the loan which they were
seeking, nor the rents, in order to manage the park and/or perform, the work which DCP is requesting be performed,” Cicchiello wrote in his postponement request. “It is clear that action is being taken by the bank to end [the Lanoues’] ownership of the park. Therefore … the [hearings] scheduled for Thursday, November 21 … and Monday, November 25 … are unnecessary and a waste of … resources because [the Lanoues] do not have the financial ability to perform any of the work.”
“Once the receivership action is filed in Superior Court, then the receiver will be managing the park,” Cicchiello wrote, “and it is expected that the receiver will be responsible to perform the work which DCP is requesting be done, and which [the Lanoues] agreed to perform had they received the loan from the bank.”
Cicchiello wrote that the Lanoues “are willing to enter into a stipulated judgment in order to resolve [the DCP’s investigation and hearings], and then wait for the receivership and foreclosure actions to conclude.” He added that the DCP also has hearing dates scheduled beginning the first week of December, to which the proceedings can be continued, “to ensure that the receivership action has been filed by the bank … and that the receiver is managing the park and addressing the concerns of the DCP.”
Cicchiello’s request was opposed by Paulette Annon, the DCP staff attorney who has been pressing the state’s probe of the Lanoues. But the DCP’s hearing officer, Cat Arsenault, agreed to continue the case to Dec. 2, saying that “while the receiver’s role and future actions will not absolve the [Lanoues’] past conduct, neither party will be prejudiced by the delay of the hearing.”
‘Grave and imminent danger’
The DCP says the Lanoues have failed to meet their legal responsibilities to tenants in areas such as providing adequate water drainage, controlling weed growth and maintaining roads. Their failure to complete staterequired tree trimming and removal has resulted in “a grave and imminent danger to the health and safety of the tenants,” according to an eight-page complaint issued last March by DCP Commissioner Michelle Seagull.
The Lanoues received a certified letter in February 2018 from a DCP inspector, ordering them to have a licensed arborist deal with overgrown or dead trees that threatened to fall and hurt someone. “In particular,” the letter highlighted the dangerous condition of “the large tree at unit 136.”
Lanoue wrote back to DCP in May 2018 saying he would take care of it, but he never did.
Nine months later, on a windy Nov. 3, 2018, as Richard Ozga lay on his bed in Unit 136 waiting for his daughter-in-law to pick him up to go shopping, he heard a “loud snapping” from outside and the toppling oak crashed through the roof, he told The Courant in a May interview. It missed him by a foot and a half or “it would have split my head,” he said. Ozga has been living in a small campertype trailer outside his ruined mobile home.
The situation surfaced in public largely through the efforts of the the park’s most vocal resident, Anne Bellone, who lives a few hundred feet up the road from Ozga. She began emailing complaints to DCP in 2017 about problems, and DCP sent out a series of inspectors over the next two years. Bellone was frustrated that the inspectors and DCP didn’t press hard enough for results, and she was infuriated when the tree fell on Ozga’s unit. She intensified her protests, and four months later, in March 2019, Seagull’s formal complaint kicked off the current DCP proceedings.
Bellone, Ozga and other residents had been asked to testify at the resumed hearings, but whether that will happen after this latest postponement remains to be seen.
Bellone, meanwhile, remained uneasy Thursday, saying, “I was very disappointed in how slowly the DCP moved in our case, which has been ongoing since 2017, and now my major concern is what’s going to happen to these trees. We’re still stuck with these dangerous trees.” She said if the Lanoues give way to a receiver designated by the bank to run the park, she wants assurances from DCP that the problems will be addressed and it will be safe to live there.