Kingstown Mobile Home Park v. Strashnick, 774 A.2d 847 (2001)

Citation: Kingstown Mobile Home Park v. Strashnick, 774 A.2d 847 (2001)
Parent Document: Kingstown Mobile Home Park v. Strashnick, 774 A.2d 847 (2001)
Jurisdiction: Rhode Island (state)
Effective Date: 2001-06-26
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1515698/kingstown-mobile-home-park-v-st... ↗

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Although the act contains no statement or other indication that the “limitations” enumerated in § 31-44-2(a) were intended to constitute the exclusive or only grounds for terminating a mobile-home-park tenancy, the majority, nevertheless, decrees this to be so, apparently believing that mobile-home-park tenants deserve even greater protections beyond those express additional safeguards that the General Assembly has afforded to mobile home tenants in the act. But even if I were to concede, ar-guendo, that as a policy matter, mobile-home-park tenants deserve even greater protections from terminations and evictions than the act currently provides — and the act certainly gives them much greater protections than other residential tenants presently enjoy — I do not believe that a mere judicial belief in the righteousness of this policy is enough of a warrant for this Court to legislate the extent and degree of what those heightened protections should be. I believe the General Assembly has specified the additional protections that it desired to extend to such tenants in enacting chapter 44 of title 31. Although clearly providing mobile-home-park tenants with greater protections than conventional residential tenants, the General Assembly neglected to go so far as to prevent them from suffering a termination at the end of a periodic tenancy — as long as that termination does not constitute a reprisal for the tenant’s taking a protected action, as long as the owner complies with the “limitations” of § 31-44-2(a) (if the termination implicates any of the six “limitations” fist-ed therein), and as long as the tenant receives the requisite sixty-days-advance-written notice. Thus, I would not construe § 31-44-2(a) as providing that mobile-home-park tenants can be terminated only for one of the six enumerated “limitations” set forth in that statute — at least when the Legislature, in its wisdom, declined to go this far in its framing of that law.

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