Lake Residents Jarred By Evictions

AVON PARK - Gary Reeder, a self-described professional bass fisherman, was shocked Jan. 9 when the Bonnet Lake RV Park's management gave him and at least two other tenants eviction notices.

According to the notices Reeder and two other residents supplied to Highlands Today, they received a three-day notice to vacate for not complying with the RV park's rules. Specifically, Reeder and fellow residents Eugene Walp and Bobby Green said that they and at least three others were all given the notices because they had their fishing boats parked in their lots rather than in a storage area the park recently built.

The problem, they say, is that these winter residents have parked their boats in their RV lots for several years with the previous landlord's permission. Reeder even built a carport to shelter his $40,000 boat.

"Before I bought it (his lot in the park), the manager, John (Ayres) said I could build a metal carport," Reeder said.

Warwick Furr, an attorney representing Reeder, filed a notice Tuesday ordering Bonnet Lake not to enforce the rule forbidding him from parking his boat in his own lot because of the verbal agreement made with the old landlord.

Sandy Ayres, the current landlord, did not respond to an e-mail, and property manager Adam Lawrence said that neither he nor Ayres would comment for this story. Furr also declined comment.

Walp estimated "six to eight" people, including himself, got the three-day notices last week. He believed the order applied to his situation as well as Reeder's.

Reeder, Green and Walp all said that John Ayres made these agreements verbally and they had no written documents. To complicate the matter, Ayres committed suicide late last year, making his wife Sandy the sole owner of the RV resort.

According to Walp's copy of a Dec. 17, 2007 letter issued by Lawrence to all of the park's residents, Sandy Ayres required everyone to keep their boats in storage instead of their lots.

"Sandy is not concerned with 'John said I could do this' or 'John let me do that,'" Lawrence wrote, addressing the verbal agreements the tenants claimed to have had with John Ayres.

Walp said the letter came as many of the RV park residents, who are snowbirds, came down from their summer homes. Many of them left their boats there for the summer.

Green and Reeder were concerned that the storage area was insecure. The storage area is a dirt lot with a gated entrance and marked spaces for the boats, and it lacks lighting and power to charge the boats up.

"Anyone can come in the back way and vandalize our boat," Green said.

Walp, a disabled World War II veteran, and Reeder, who walks with a tube in his groin after a recent prostate surgery, said they could not easily go that distance to the storage lot to get their boats, then drive them back to their homes to charge them up for fishing trips.

Most other RV parks in Highlands County require lot owners to either dock their boats or place them in a storage facility rather than on their lots, said Tracy MacCornack, a Ridge Real Estate agent that deals with RV parks in the area.

"It varies from place to place. There's no set policy that I know of," she added.

As for the arrangements at Bonnet Lake while John Ayres managed it? "Evidently he was being a nice guy, but that's not the norm."