Mobile home park and Santa Clarita at loggerheads over solar panels

Attorneys for a mobile home park in Santa Clarita have played their latest card in a legal poker game with the city over a hillside covered with solar panels.

Canyon View Mobile Home Estates has responded to an appeal filed by the city to a judge’s order regarding the solar system at 20001 Canyon View Drive in Canyon Country, The Signal reported.

Superior Court Judge Stephen Pfahler ruled early last year that if the city orders the removal of 6,580 solar panels, the city must pay for the panels (which it can keep) and the cost of plucking them off the hill.

The city’s appeal last spring argued the city 30 miles north of Los Angeles shouldn’t have to pay the $5 million for the solar panels installed by California Solar, and their removal. It said the panels had violated a conditional use permit for the mobile home park regarding open space.

Santa Clarita attorneys noted the judge agreed that the banks of silver-gray panels were an “abatable nuisance.”

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Canyon View, owned by the Seidenglanz family, had claimed it had installed the solar system legally under the authority of the state’s Housing & Community Development Department, which oversees mobile home parks. 

The property owners’ attorneys responded to the city’s appeal by saying Santa Clarita had said for years it had no jurisdiction over the park — and then did an about-face after the park installed its multimillion-dollar solar power system. 

The city filed its nuisance enforcement action against the mobile home park in 2018, after which it spent $1.1 million in legal fees attempting to have the panels removed, according to The Signal.

— Dana Bartholomew