Write a commentImagine turning on the faucet to wash your hands, but without warning, nothing comes out.
Imagine having nowhere to put your trash for months at a time. Imagine that much of it isn’t even your trash, but came from a previous tenant of your home, which was never cleaned out before being rented again. Imagine living without a properly functioning refrigerator because rats—attracted to all of the trash you cannot dispose of—have chewed through the wiring. Imagine moving in over the summer and, when cold weather sets in, discovering that your furnace is broken and your landlord won’t fix it due to a clause in your lease that you’re later told is illegal.
This is daily life for many of the residents of Country Haven Mobile Home Park, located just off of Rathburn Road in Hannibal. The park is owned by Dario Stipisic of New York City, and managed locally by Les Baker.
“Do you think I really want to live in a crappy trailer?” said Amanda VanHorn, who has lived at Country Haven for approximately a year. “[Our living conditions are] embarrassing but at the same time, we need to bring attention to the situation so we can get justice.”
Trash, Rats, and More Trash
VanHorn was surprised on her move-in day to discover rooms filled with trash in the trailer she’d agreed to rent. “Dario wouldn’t clean it up because he’d rented me the trailer as is,” VanHorn said. On top of having dozens of trash bags worth of trash in her home on move-in day, the stove and refrigerator were missing. The Property Maintenance Code in New York mandates that each rental unit be provided with suitable cooking and food prep facilities, which is regularly interpreted to include appliances like a working stove and refrigerator.
“I had a mini fridge of my own plugged in, but rats chewed through the power cord,” VanHorn explained. Now she grocery shops several times a week—anything less than that, and the rats get to it. She showed the iHeart Oswego team videos of rats climbing in and around her cupboards from as far back as July of 2025, seemingly unafraid of people. Vermin is an issue commonly covered by New York’s Warrant of Habitability laws; in other words, landlords are generally held responsible for keeping pests under control.
Above: Homes throughout the park are suffering from an infestation of rats.
One resident showed iHeart Oswego emails from January 2026 about rats damaging the wiring of their mobile home and asking what management was doing to mitigate the rat problem. Stipisic replied with a recommendation for wooden traps and a reminder to keep trash in sealed containers—putting the onus entirely on the resident for what is generally understood to be the owner’s / operator’s responsibility under the law.
VanHorn noted that the rats don’t just damage homes and eat food in the pantry—she’s even been bitten in her sleep. “I woke up when one chomped on my thumb.” She winced as she recounted how painful it was when the rat’s teeth pierced her nail.
The rodents also frequently contribute to an unsafe living environment, raising the risk of housefires like the one which devastated the Webster family in April. (Country Haven has had a second trailer fire since then, affecting the trailer next door to the Webster family’s lot.) The rats also act as a potential source of contamination for the park’s well water. The water tested positive for coliform in three separate samples taken in mid-September, according to records from the Oswego County Health Department.
Because of the conditions there, it should come as no surprise that Child Protective Services is a frequent visitor to the mobile home park. One resident has temporarily lost custody of her two minor children due to her living conditions. In a family court report the resident shared with iHeart Oswego dated April 14, it states: “[Resident]'s housing continues to have safety hazards, including rodents in the home.”
The park hasn’t always been overrun by rodents. “Nothing went wrong until Dario took over,” said one resident, who insisted on anonymity due to fear of a retaliatory eviction. “But they [owner Dario Stipisic and property manager Les Baker] don’t care about enforcing the rules.”
According to Lisa Dunn, who has lived in the park for approximately 30 years, the issues with rats began last summer. “On May 2nd, 2025, the dumpsters for the park were just gone,” Dunn said. She pulled up contemporaneous text messages of her asking Stipisic about what happened to their trash removal, which were met with a snippy response about people from inside and outside the park abusing the dumpsters. Dunn later lodged an official complaint to New York State’s Division of Homes and Community Renewal, as shown by documentation provided directly to iHeart Oswego by owner Dario Stipisic. In his response to the state, Stipisic attached a letter showing that residents were notified of the change in trash removal—dated May 12, a full 10 days after Dunn asked where the dumpsters had gone.
“I told [management] to just install a trail camera and point it at the dumpsters [to stop the abuse],” said Tim Gordon, another long-time resident. “They ignored me. Their attitude has been really poor.”
Instead, tenants were directed to buy dump stickers for $200 for a one-time rent credit of $50 or rent a dumpster from Landmark for $30 a month in exchange for a $10 a month rent credit, according to documentation provided to the iHeart Oswego team by owner Dario Stipisic. “People without a vehicle here are really screwed,” said VanHorn. Tenants with minimal extra income—a description that applies to the majority of the households in the park—could not shoulder the additional cost and were left unable to dispose of their trash, despite trash removal being listed as included with their rent. This appears to be in violation of New York State’s Real Property Law Chapter 50, Article 7, Section 233, which prohibits, in part, any “manufactured home park owner or operator who has agreed to provide … any… service or facility to any occupant of the manufactured home park” from “willfully or intentionally without just cause fail[ing] to furnish such … service or facility.”
At the insistence of the Town of Hannibal, two dumpsters were installed in the back of the park in March 2026 and are emptied once weekly. But for the 90 or so occupied trailers in the park, this isn’t enough capacity. As a result, the dumpsters are frequently overflowing and trash tends to be piled next to them. After nearly 10 months without park-wide trash removal and now garbage piled next to over-full dumpsters, the rat infestation in the park has only gotten worse.
According to former tenant Hope Clary, the problem is evolving beyond rats: her son moved out of the park last year because of snakes in his home, as well as safety concerns over the drinking water. “I told him, that’s not safe for my grandbabies and he had to leave.” The Department of Social Services placed her son and his children in a hotel for a short while due to the emergent nature of the situation. Clary’s daughter continues to be a tenant there, but refuses to drink or use the water; instead, she fills jugs at her mother’s home in Liverpool.
Water: A Human Right Often Denied to Country Haven Residents
The anonymous resident's family court report also mentioned problems related to water access: “[Resident] recently reported that her plumbing does not work.” The resident asserts that her plumbing was broken by one of the park’s inexperienced maintenance workers, who are—according to every tenant iHeart Oswego spoke to—reportedly unlicensed, inexperienced (“bumbling” in the words of Tim Gordon), and working under the table to pay off back rent and avoid eviction. “I told [management] I needed someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone with a license,” the resident told iHeart Oswego stated. Her plumbing remains unfixed.
But problems with water are not limited to plumbing in an individual home; there are also serious access issues that are systemic to the park.
In one FOIL request obtained by iHeart Oswego, an unnamed tenant submitted a complaint to the County Health Department dated December 11, 2025 over water being out park-wide, not just that day, but also the night before and a total of seven times between Friday, December 5, and Sunday, December 7. The form noted that Manager Les Baker’s response to being contacted over the water outage was “not pleasant,” and Baker reportedly blamed the outages on a leak that was subsequently resolved. The complaint was closed the same day.
However, that is far from the end of the water woes at the park. One current resident, who insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation from management, showed the iHeart Oswego team a calendar the resident used to track water outages: in January 2026, the resident noticed that the water was not working a total of 12 times. Water was out at least eight times in March and five times in April.
Screenshots from a Facebook group used to communicate with tenants show very little warning given to residents regarding water outages, even coming after the fact. “Why bother to check the Facebook when I already know it’s not working because nothing’s coming out of the faucet?” said resident Jessica Gordon when asked about the timeliness of the outage notices. In a May 6, 2026 post by Baker shared with the iHeart Oswego team, Baker asked callously, “How many gonna [sic] call county and complain” simultaneously with another post informing residents that water would be shut off to replace a valve—suggesting that the water had been turned off before notice was given. “Imagine if you were in the shower when that happened!” VanHorn said.
With no notice being given for many of the frequent outages—or being given exclusively in a Facebook group that some tenants have been removed from by management—it is possible the number of outages per month is much higher than the anonymous resident was able to tally on their own.
In a response to the state regarding water outages dated February 27, 2026—provided directly to iHeart Oswego by the owner—Stipisic wrote, “Occasionally, during winter months, there is a leak in the mobile home park due to a burst water line and then the whole park water needs to be briefly turned off so that we can locate the water leak and make appropriate repairs. The county health department allows up to 4 hours of interrupted water supply and we never exceed that allotment.”
If the issue was resolved in December or is exclusively related to routine maintenance like valve replacements and burst pipes over the winter, then why are weekly outages continuing even into warmer weather?
According to several current and former residents, the pump that runs well water to the mobile homes in the park may not be adequate to support the number of trailers now in the park. “They were talking about needing to install a second pump when I was still there,” said Clary, who moved out a number of years ago. “But that was under previous management. The park’s gotten bigger since then, and I doubt Dario [Stipisic] has taken care of it, based on the problems [tenants] are having there.”
Why Residents Are Afraid to Speak Up
Long-time resident Lisa Dunn noted just how complex the issue of speaking up is. “Many people here are afraid to say anything; fear of homelessness has been a major factor in the silence.”
VanHorn and Dunn have both been taken to court for eviction notices, though the cases have been thrown out. “They don’t like us because we speak up,” VanHorn asserted.
Eviction isn’t a rare issue in the park. Representatives from Legal Aid were working with park residents from June 2025 until April 2026, as so many tenants cannot afford the help they need to stay in their homes. They only closed their park-wide workshops because not enough tenants were willing to speak up, even with the promise of legal help. One long-time resident told iHeart Oswego that he didn’t feel comfortable saying anything publicly about the park’s problems because the last time he spoke up to park management, he was faced with veiled threats of eviction.
Others are worried about the park being condemned; with so many residents on a fixed income, they’ve been priced out of most other accommodations in the area. (Lot rent ranges from $380 to $400, while those renting trailers and lots can expect to pay between $780 and $1,000.)
One resident, who spoke with iHeart Oswego on condition of anonymity, explained that she is both elderly and disabled, and her $1,400 a month income is barely sufficient to cover the modest rental payments at Country Haven. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. Others echoed these concerns, suggesting that if the park was condemned, they would likely become homeless.
Why is eviction such a common issue in the park? Some residents have been advised by lawyers that they can withhold their rent when critical issues and repairs are not done. “I’ve got the money sitting in a separate account; [park owner Dario Stipisic] can get paid as soon as the rat infestation has been taken care of,” Dunn told iHeart.
But rather than addressing the rats—or the underlying causes for them—Stipisic instead has historically preferred to threaten residents and issue eviction notices that his tenants are largely too poor to fight. After iHeart Oswego’s report on the Webster family’s housefire, management did report that they were setting rat traps in an attempt to deal with the infestation. “But they didn’t put any by my lot!” VanHorn asserted.
Dunn’s own son Thomas is now homeless after being evicted. Dunn has custody of her granddaughter, but her son has been harassed so much about even visiting his family that there is no option for him to live with his mother. “He’s had to call the police on the property manager for harassment,” Dunn told iHeart Oswego, showing the team screenshots of the call on a police scanner website. “He can’t even visit his own child without being threatened.”
What’s next for the residents of Country Haven?
Many residents hope to get out and find other, more suitable living conditions, but are limited by up-front expenses like security deposits or down payments. VanHorn is putting together a GoFundMe to support residents of Country Haven and Stipisic’s other mobile home parks to provide families with funding to move out. Stipisic owns multiple parks throughout Oswego County, including 346-368 Stock Road in Hannibal; 1203 County Route 3 in Hannibal (known as Carter Road); 285 County Route 29 in Scriba; and of course, Country Haven Mobile Home Park at 431-469 Rathburn Road in Hannibal.
Other tenants who own their trailers or plan to stay due to finances have a different goal: new management and, ideally, new ownership. In the meantime, most would settle for reliable access to the water and rodent-free environment they need as the foundation for a safe and healthy life.
