Citrus Park Village residents said Sunday that Vero Beach Regional Airport officials still hadn’t explained to them why – after more than half a century – the Federal Aviation Administration is forcing the city to shut down their mobile home community.
Two weeks after news of their impending eviction was broken on the front page of Vero Beach 32963, in fact, residents of the 69-unit mobile home park, located on the airport’s periphery, said they had not heard a word from the city.
“We can’t say what we’re going to do, because we haven’t officially been notified yet,” said one of the residents, all of whom agreed to speak only on the condition their names not be used.
“Realistically, though, there doesn’t appear to be much we can do, other than leave when we told to.
“The city has every right to close the park,” she added. “All they have to do is not renew our leases. But they do owe us an explanation. This mobile home park has been here since 1968.
“What changed?”
Vero Beach Airport Director Todd Scher said he’s not sure what prompted the FAA’s action, but he believes the mobile home park became an issue during the summer of 2020, shortly after he got the job.
That’s when the FAA informed city officials that they needed to incorporate into all airport property leases language detailing the requirements under the American with Disabilities Act.
Scher said he consulted with City Attorney John Turner, who then asked the FAA if the ADA language mandate pertained to the airport’s mobile home park leases.
The FAA’s response, Scher said, was: “Wait, you have a mobile home park at the airport?”
Two years later, Scher received a letter notifying him that the FAA had rejected the city’s request to allow the mobile home community to continue occupying the property.
The letter also carried a warning: If Vero Beach officials don’t remove the mobile homes and rezone the property to an FAA-approved land use designation, the airport no longer would be eligible for federal grants. In addition, the city could be required to return federal funds it already had received.
The FAA gave the city until Oct. 28 to present a “corrective action plan” to resolve the matter. Scher said both Turner and Vero Beach Planning Director Jason Jeffries helped draft the plan, which he hoped to submit this week.
He said he doesn’t know when – or if – the FAA will approve the city’s plan.
“That’s a big unknown,” he said. “The FAA is really good at giving us timelines, but they don’t tell us theirs. It took them eight months to respond to our initial questions about the mobile home park.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “we can’t tell the residents anything until the FAA gets back to us.”
Scher said airports across America – including others in Florida – also are being forced to remove long-term residential use from their premises. As for why the FAA has decided to crack down now, he said the agency provided no answer.
Vero Beach officials tried to save Citrus Park Village, writing in an Aug. 11 letter to the FAA that residential use of the property has been ongoing since “circa 1942” – when the current airport site was a Naval Air Station, before the U.S. government transferred the land to the city in 1947.
The FAA, however, was unmoved.
“They’ve told us we can’t have a mobile home park on airport property,” Scher said. “All we can do now is try to give the residents as much time as possible to find somewhere else to live.”
