Court-appointed officials met with more than 100 Desert Mobile Home Park residents Sunday to discuss the future of the dilapidated 40-acre park, following a judge's decision last week to keep it open.

Arturo Rodriguez, lead counsel on behalf of the tenants in a federal lawsuit to shut down the park, commonly known as “Duroville,” told tenants it was their responsibility to clean up and repair their trailers — and to pay rent.

Rumors circulated among Duroville's poor, overcrowded farm-worker community last month that the park would shut down in a matter of days, said Tom Flynn, Duroville's court-appointed receiver. The rumors prompted 40 percent of the tenants to not pay their April rent, he said.

Most of the 267-unit park's trailers are overcrowded. Rent is $375 plus electricity per trailer, Flynn said. Officials plan to recoup the owed rent. The revenues, they say, are key to fixing faulty sewage, water system, electrical wiring and propane leaks, among other problems.

“All these things are fixable,” Flynn said. “There's nothing like having the power of a federal court behind you.”

In October 2007, the U.S. Attorney's Office, on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, filed a lawsuit to shut down the park because of its dangerous conditions. U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson on Thursday granted Duroville a two-year reprieve to repair the park and bring it up to code.

“You can't make 4,000 people go away,” Rodriguez said.

The health and safety concerns documented at Duroville are hardly unique — they represent “systemic” problems at more than 100 mobile home parks across the Coachella Valley, aid workers, lawyers and staffers familiar with the local parks said Sunday.

Up to 200 valley mobile home parks on county and Indian reservation land operate without the proper permits, said Sister Gabi Williams of the Diocese of San Bernardino's Office of Social Concerns, who's advocated for better valley mobile home park conditions since 2003.

Many residents at these parks without permits face similar fire hazards and faulty sewage, water and electrical systems as Duroville residents, Williams said.

 “These parks are indicative of a larger problem of a lack of safe, affordable housing in the Coachella Valley,” Rodriguez said.

Duroville, gained widespread attention in 2002 when elementary students there started showing up to school “lethargic” and with bloody noses, Rodriguez and others said. Those incidents happened as the federal government sued owners of a neighboring dump accused of illegally burning garbage.

Scientists from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported soil samples at the dump with elevated levels of dioxin, a harmful chemical associated with burning plastic. The dump was shut down, Rodriguez said.

To deal with the widespread problem of parks without permits, Riverside County formed a special task force, Flynn said. County officials first checked that residents were free from “imminent danger,” and they've completed about 40 comprehensive inspections at parks in the past year, he said.

Los Angeles-based attorney Chandra Gehri Spencer, of California Rural Legal Assistance, and the county filed suit against the owners of St. Anthony's Mobile Home Park in Mecca to make immediate improvements to the park's water and electrical systems, said Spencer, who helped represent the Duroville residents.

Officials learned about the problems at St. Anthony's when the park's residents started to attend meetings at Duroville, Spencer said.