Following a public hearing Oct. 1 , Norway’s Select Board approved a special town meeting warrant that paves the way for residents to vote on a proposed ordinance regulating how national corporations charge lot rent to mobile home owners.

The special town meeting will be held Oct. 15 at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School’s Forum meeting room at 256 Main St. in Paris at 6 p.m.

Norway is the latest town to push back against what many say are predatory practices by out-of-state companies that buy mobile home parks and hike lot rents on residents through Maine state law loopholes.

The town previously adopted a moratorium on lot rent increases last March at a special town meeting attended by 160 voters, more than twice the number that would be at its annual town meeting three months later. 

Communities, including Auburn, Jay, Old Orchard Beach, Saco, Sanford, Waterville and Brunswick, have taken or are considering similar actions.

The law, meant to prevent excessive rent and fee increases, passed in 2025 as LD 1723, created the opposite effect, allowing park owners to raise rents as often as every three months using formulas with vague, inflated data and no geographic basis.

Sun Communities, owner of the 55+ Norway Commons mobile home park at 99 Town and Country Drive, had previously planned to raise lot rents, using $741 as its basis of the average cost in the area. The park has more than 230 homesites, according to its website.

But no one in or around Norway, or even in coastal Maine towns, paid anywhere near that and Sun Communities refused to share the data it used to determine the figure, according to Norway park residents.

In Norway’s proposed ordinance, lot rent fees will be limited to the most recently posted annual percentage change in the consumer price index plus 1%, not to exceed 5%, and calculated against each resident’s existing rent or fee.

Some categories of parks would be exempt: 1. those owned by a cooperative of residents; 2. those parks with lots subject to any agreement that is more restrictive than the ordinance; and 3. those parks in which all lots are subject to an aggregate lot rent and fee amount or above the affordability threshold, defined as 20% of the current fair market rent for existing housing, based on the two-bedroom column for the relevant nonmetropolitan county (Oxford), as posted by the Maine State Housing Authority.

If passed on Oct. 15, the ordinance will go into effect immediately.

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