PALMER LAKE — Donald Simmons doesn’t want cancer.

He and his wife have been living in the Elephant Rock Mobile Home Park, just outside downtown Monument, for the past 13 years because it’s the cheapest option in town.

And for the last five of them, their tap water has been contaminated with elevated levels of radium, a naturally occurring radioactive metal that can be carcinogenic.

Simmons won’t drink it, but his wife does. And it makes him nervous.

“What’s it gonna do to our bodies?” he asked Tuesday as he sat next to his neighbor’s porch, a drill in hand. “What is this going to do to us in the long term?”

The state is well aware of Elephant Rock and its tainted water. But Colorado’s top water regulators say they’ve never been in a situation like this.

Since early 2019, officials with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment have cited the park owner, Kim Lucky Oliver, repeatedly for refusing to comply with state water regulations and failing to inform park residents of the radium issues.

The state’s attorney general sued Oliver in August, seeking to compel the park owner to follow the law. An El Paso County judge in February found him in contempt and assessed $70,000 in fines. In a letter last month, the attorney general’s office told him it planned to seek a warrant for his arrest.

Oliver, though, has ignored all communications and failed to clean up the water. Meanwhile, residents say the owner has been absentee — failing to even collect rent, pick up trash or plow their streets during the winter. The water system is so flawed, homeowners say, that it has to be shut off weekly in order to avoid catastrophe.

“This case is without precedent,” said Ron Falco, Colorado’s Safe Drinking Water program manager.

The park owner, who lives in Peyton, did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.

Despite aggressive state actions over four years, Elephant Rock’s 60 residents still don’t have clean water.

“It’s a nightmare,” Simmons said.

Their plight represents an extreme example of mobile home park neglect — an issue that has prompted Colorado lawmakers over the past five years to run numerous bills aimed at boosting protections for those living in America’s last bastion of unsubsidized affordable housing. Democrats this session introduced legislation that would create a statewide water quality testing program at mobile home parks, following decades of resident complaints over rust-colored water and frequent outages.

The case in Palmer Lake also shines a light on the more than two dozen mobile home parks across Colorado that have never registered with the state’s oversight program — leaving residents to largely fend for themselves.

Years of violations

Water issues are nothing new for those living in Elephant Rock.

The state in 2009 brought an enforcement case to district court against Oliver’s father, also named Kim, for failing to monitor and report contaminants in the drinking water, including nitrate, disinfection byproducts, lead and copper.

That case led to a consent decree, though it took three years for Oliver Sr. to complete the necessary requirements.

Despite resolving those issues, the park owner, between 2014 and 2018, “continued to sporadically violate monitoring and reporting requirements,” the state said in its recent complaint.

But since 2018, Elephant Rock has violated the maximum contaminant level for combined radium 15 times, according to the attorney general’s lawsuit. In every quarter since January 2019, state water regulators have issued violation notices to Oliver.

State officials in 2021 didn’t even seem to know who actually was running the park, records show. In May of that year, a contract operator of the park’s water system informed the state that Oliver Sr. was sick, so regulators started sending violation notices to his son. For a while, state public health workers suspected the elder Oliver had died but the son wouldn’t answer queries or respond to the violation orders.

Eventually, the state had to confirm Oliver Sr.’s death through public records, according to the court filing.

“The pattern of lack of communication and lack of progress on this issue has existed before the current owner,” Falco said.

Elephant Rock’s radium levels, in some samples, came in at 8 picocuries per liter — a mark that’s 60% above the maximum contaminant level of 5 picocuries per liter.

Radium is found in soil, water, plants and food — usually at low concentrations. The greatest potential for human exposure to radium is through drinking water, where levels are usually less than 1 picocurie per liter, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Radium and radon are potent human carcinogens,” the EPA says on its website.

Colorado’s Water Quality Control Division, in its materials sent to residents, says people who drink water containing radium above the maximum limit over many years “may have an increased risk of getting cancer.”

The department has also been forced to issue two bottled water advisories since 2021 notifying Elephant Rock residents not to drink the park’s tap water — measures the state called an “extraordinary step.”

In the first instance, in August 2021, the contract operator for the park notified the department that someone had placed a lock on the treatment building, barring him for two weeks from operating or monitoring the water disinfection treatment, according to the state’s lawsuit.

When Oliver didn’t deliver the bottled water notice to residents, as required, a state official did it.

In July 2022, the department issued a second bottled water advisory after the water system lost pressure during an electrical outage. Loss of pressure, water officials say, may allow disease-causing organisms to enter the water. Oliver didn’t respond to that violation notice either, the state alleged.

Over the past four years, state regulators have tried every avenue to compel Oliver to comply with the law — to no avail.

They have called, emailed, sent certified mail and hired process servers to show up to his house, records show.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment can fine people $100 a day for failing to comply with formal enforcement orders. In March 2022, state officials told Oliver that he had been in violation for 647 days — resulting in more than $65,000 in fines. (Those fines, however, have since been dropped since the case began against Oliver Sr. and cannot be transferred to new owners.)

An El Paso County judge in February found Lucky Oliver in contempt, ordering him to pay $70,000 in penalties — an accumulation of $1,000 per day for 70 days of violations. The park owner never showed up to the contempt hearing.

It’s now been more than 1,000 days since the Olivers were ordered to clean up his park’s water — and five years since the radium levels first exceeded state thresholds.

Last month, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, in a letter to Oliver, said the division planned to seek a bench warrant for his arrest by the end of March unless he contacted the state to “take appropriate steps to comply with the order.”

“If granted, the court may have you arrested and held in jail until you comply with its orders,” Rebecca Fischer, an assistant attorney general, wrote in the March 10 letter.

Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, said the state has not yet sought the warrant, “but is committed to pursuing appropriate sanctions.”

This case has sent state water regulators into “new territory,” Falco said.

His department only goes to court once or twice a year, at most, to compel water operators to follow the law, he said. Normally that’s enough to ensure compliance. But seeking a bench warrant? That’s beyond where his office has gone.

There are currently 35 water systems in the state above the legal limit for radionuclides — including radium — but all of them are them are on the path to compliance, according to state water officials.

Except for Elephant Rock.

“We don’t have experience with as prolonged a period of lack of communication, lack of progress and lack of coordination with us to address this issue as we do in this case,” Falco said.

“It’s really sad”

Elephant Rock residents say things started to go downhill after the elder Oliver died.

The son is never around and doesn’t respond when called or texted, inhabitants say.

“Nobody can get him,” said Stewart Currier, a resident who says he brokered a handshake deal with the younger Oliver to manage the park. “He’s very elusive.”

The landlord stopped paying for trash services, leading the waste company to remove the dumpsters from the park. Now residents have to take their refuse to the dump themselves.

Nobody plows the snow during the winter, a task that falls under the park owner’s responsibilities. As a result, Simmons and other mobile home owners with trucks try to pack down the powder as much as they can so people with smaller cars can drive in and out of the park.

Denise Jones and her husband, Geoffrey, said they didn’t even know they had radium in the water until the state sent them a letter.

“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I’m too old to care.”

Currier, 61, said he still drinks the water from the tap, radium and all.

“I’m a miner,” he said from his porch. “I know what radiation does and what it looks like.”

Paul Grant, the park water system’s contract operator, who maintains the system and submits samples to state regulators, claimed the radium levels are back in compliance after they switched wells recently. Those results, he said, have been reported to the state.

“The water has always been clean to drink,” he said.

The state has seen radium levels in Elephant Rock for the final quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023 below the maximum contaminant levels.

But a “couple quarters of lower results do not equal a full return to compliance,” Falco said.

“What they need to do is communicate with us, cooperate with us and follow terms from the enforcement order,” he said. “Short-term return to slightly lower values during a time of year when they’re not using as much water as during the summer — that’s not what we’re looking for.”

The plan is to upgrade the water to a reverse osmosis system by Christmas 2024, Currier said, though it’s unclear who would pay for it.

The park is on its own well and constantly runs into issues. Currier said he’s forced to shut off the water every week for a couple hours in order to avert disaster. This leads to constant resident gripes.

“You try and wash the dishes as fast as you can cause you don’t know when the water will go out,” said Kevin Suarez, another resident.

On top of the years-long water violations, Elephant Rock is one of 28 parks across Colorado that never registered with the state’s Mobile Home Oversight Program, as is required by law, department records show.

“Lucky (Oliver) hasn’t done (expletive),” Currier said when told that the park is unregistered.

The state has assessed a $3,000 delinquent registration penalty and recorded a lien for that amount against the park, said Christina Postolowski, the oversight program’s manager. Unpaid penalties can be sent to collections.

As of Oct. 1, under a bill signed by Gov. Jared Polis last year, landlords who do not register with the oversight program, or have unpaid penalties, are ineligible to raise rent.

Oliver hasn’t even collected lot rent since taking over in 2021, multiple residents said, leading to confusion over whether the landlord might ask for back payments in the future.

Denise Jones, 63, recalls residents shoving envelopes with rent into a box set up in the park. But then someone broke into the box, taking the cash and leaving other checks and money orders lying on the road.

“It’s crazy,” she said.

The Mobile Home Oversight Program has received two complaints — one individual, one group — from Elephant Rock residents against Oliver, Postolowski said. Both are still under investigation.

Simmons, for his part, worries what will happen to people if the park gets foreclosed on or is redeveloped.

“If we lose it,” he said, “some people will be homeless.”

It’s hard for the longtime resident to see the park crumble. They live in a beautiful area, with the Rocky Mountain foothills just visible across Route 105.

But several trailers are vacant. One was consumed by a fire. Others are falling apart.

On Tuesday afternoon, Simmons — clad in blue-jean overalls and a white shirt — was helping a neighbor fix their wooden porch, dreaming of going back to his native Missouri.

“It’s sad,” he said. “It’s really sad.”

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