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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This interpretation also avoids converting mobile-home-park residents into de facto permanent tenants. For that is the practical effect of limiting a park owner's reasons for termination to those enumerated in § 31-44-2(a). Under the majority's interpretation, unless a tenant fails to pay rent, fails to comply with applicable law, fails to adhere to rules and regulations relating to mobile andmanufactured home parks, or unless the tenant fails to comply with one of the other "limitations" in § 31-44-2(a), the tenant has a right to remain in the park as a tenant for the indefinite future and cannot be terminated for any other reason. Although, as the majority suggests, such an incursion into an owner's property rights may well survive federal constitutional scrutiny in a case that properly raises such a challenge, our state constitution could be construed to raise a higher bar than its federal counterpart to uncompensated takings of private property. In any event, because of the radical *865 nature of creating such quasi-permanent tenancies against the will of park owners, I would require a much clearer statement from the Legislature before I would ascribe such a potentially confiscatory purpose to the framers of this legislation  especially when the act as drafted is already chock full of anti-reprisal measures and other extraordinary protections for mobile-home tenants against arbitrary terminations  without taking the unwarranted step of judicially grafting onto it an exclusivity provision that the text of the statute simply cannot support. See Brennan, 529 A.2d at 637 (holding that "in interpreting a legislative enactment * * * the court must attempt to ascertain the [legislative] intent by considering the enactment in its entirety and by viewing it in light of circumstances and purposes that motivated its passage. * * * A statute or enactment may not be construed in a way that would attribute to the Legislature an intent that would result in absurdities or would defeat the underlying purpose of the enactment. * * * Moreover, we have indicated that when apparently inconsistent statutory provisions are questioned, every attempt should be made to construe and apply them so as to avoid the inconsistency and should not be applied literally if to do so would produce patently absurd or unreasonable results.").

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