This the second in a series of articles on disaster preparedness and how to safeguard your community, save lives and minimize damage.

For manufactured home communities, emergency management experts recommend putting together a committee of residents, with the following minimum responsibilities: 

• Working with management to develop an evacuation or shelter plan
• Setting up an emergency notification system for the community
• Conducting community education programs on disaster readiness
• Setting up evacuation practice drills
• Training residents on securing their property before evacuating
• Maintaining a list of residents with special needs
• Identifying members of the community with special skills, such as nurses, doctors or others trained in CPR or medical assistance, who could help in an emergency
• Preparing contact lists for relatives and next of kin

Generally speaking, this committee should consist of :

• Chairperson
• Training Coordinator
• Communications Coordinator
• Emergency supplies manager
• Residents with knowledge or experience in financial, insurance and legal issues

Depending on the size of your community, you may also want to appoint Block Captains, who will be responsible for maintaining data on their assigned neighborhoods and also be on call to warn residents in their area about an approaching emergency.  If your community has a large number of pets, you  may want to include someone on the committee to focus on animals.

There Are Two Major Roles For The Committee:

• Educating and training all residents about emergencies
• Actually coping with an emergency

As a manager or owner of a manufactured home community, provide the committee with excellent materials to use in doing their work, starting with this series of articles.

Committee Responsibilities:

The chair should plan and hold regular meetings of the committee to review the work that is being done.  He or she should be an active participant in other activities and lead by example.  In case of an actual emergency, the chairman and the community manager will be the center of operations and communications. The chairman can assign duties to committee members, such as maintaining a list of community members with special needs or residents with special skills or expertise.

The training coordinator should be responsible for planning and holding actual evacuation or other types of disaster drills, depending on what potential problems face your community.  For example, if the community has a central shelter that residents can use in case of a tornado, you should have a mock" emergency alert once or twice a year. Encourage everyone to participate. This will improve their own safety

Reviewing Policy

Question: How urgent is this? How soon do you recommend that we review and revise our criminal history policies?

Answer: Time is of the essence, said Williams, who believes that anyone with a broad generalized policy is at high risk for challenge. Certainly the larger your company, the more chance there will be that you could be challenged, so she believes it's a very smart practice for everyone - all companies - to take another look at their criminal screening policy to determine if it needs to be revised, and if so, to immediately go about taking the steps to do so.

MHCO.ORG Editor's Note:  These new regulations out of Portland will only impact rental property inside the city limits of Portland.  MHCO and Phil Querin will review MHCO Forms and make necessary changes in light of these new Portland regulations.  Although these new laws do not impact the rest of the state, it does concern MHCO that Portland often sets the stage for future legislative action.  We will likely be fighting this type of regulation in the 2021 and 2023 Oregon Legislative Sessions.  

Oregonlive - Oregonian  June 19, 2019

The Portland City Council on Wednesday adopted a slate of new polices intended to make landlords more forgiving of criminal records and poor credit when screening prospective tenants.

The council voted 3-1 to approve what its champion, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, called the most comprehensive reform of its kind in the country. Commissioner Amanda Fritz cast a no" vote; Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty was absent

There are three steps in a good disaster plan: planning, prevention and recovery. Knowing what to do in each step can help you reduce injuries and damage to your community.  This article discusses the planning segment of disaster preparedness.

Step 1: Learn all you can about the kinds of disasters that could possibly occur in your community - there may be some that you are not aware of.  Good resources for this information included your local emergency management office, the local American red Cross chapter or a state-level emergency preparedness agency.

For example, people at these organizations can help you lean whether your community is near a flood plain or a hazardous materials facility.  And, did you know that all 50 states and all U.S. territories are vulnerable to earthquakes?  In Oregon the risk of an earthquake is considered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be moderate to high.  On the Oregon coast even a moderate earthquake adds the additional threat of a tsunami.  Are you prepared?

When you have a list of all of the potential problems you might face, you can develop a plan on how to cope with each one. Some parts of each plan will be the same, including Steps 2 and 3 - later in this article.

Depending on the type of problems that might take place in your community, determine whether residents would ever need to evacuate or seek shelter.  If the answer is yes" to either or both questions

If you haven't done so already, pull out your resident selection criteria and take a close look at the evaluation standards for applicants with criminal records. Depending on what it says, you may need to make some changes right away. Then review it in detail - and get help from your attorney, resident screening company, and other advisors to ensure that it complies with HUD guidelines. Richer offered some key best practices:

Question. A guest has applied for temporary occupant status in our park.  He has a lengthy criminal record and we are concerned about approving him as a temporary occupant.  When we informed him, he claimed that he could not be denied because of prior criminal activity from 10 years ago.  He also said that since the community does not require a background checks for ‘guests’ he would stay with different friends throughout the park for 14 days and then move to another friend in the park.  Two questions - can we still deny based on a criminal record from 10 years ago - our screening criteria clearly says we can.  And what do you do if he starts ‘couch surfing’ every 14 days with a different friend in the park?