On a late-August Sunday afternoon, state Rep. Meg Froelich readied the meeting room at the Sheridan Library for a town hall with constituents. There was one item on the agenda: a recently enacted law designed to give mobile-home owners more protections and a way to handle disputes with the managers and park owners who control the land beneath them.

As she tended to cookies and lemonade, the stream of local residents quickly filled a few rows of folding chairs. And they kept coming. Froelich and others scrambled to set up more seats to accommodate a crowd that topped 60 residents from the handful of mobile-home parks in her district.

Why the big turnout? The 34-year-old Mobile Home Park Act had finally cut some enforcement teeth, and residents wanted to learn more about changes to the law laying out rights and responsibilities of homeowners and park owners, which critics say has been ineffective in curbing decades of abuses by park owners.

Froelich, a Democrat whose district encompasses both Sheridan and Englewood, which contain several parks, as well as upscale Cherry Hills and Greenwood Village, has known frustration in trying to bring out residents for town halls. But this effort to explain the new law and hear feedback touched a nerve.

"I could send a thousand postcards into a neighborhood, and they wouldn't generate one person," she said of her previous experience trying to bring out constituents. "This was just amazing, the number of people interested in finding out what's going on. It put a very local face on the issue."

That issue — the often-contentious relationship and power imbalance in mobile-home parks — has gained national attention amid an affordable housing crisis. and what that does to people on fixed incomes."

One of her constituents who watched the meeting with interest, 75-year-old Charlene Moore, offers an instructive account that underscores the importance of a balance of power — and perhaps cause for optimism over the dispute-resolution program — when it comes to homeowner-park manager conflicts.

She has lived with her husband, Al, in a custom-built, 1968 double-wide for more than 30 years and through, by her count, five park management teams. She also said she has fended off what she describes as multiple eviction threats.

Moore claims park management has threatened to kick her out while taking issue with a small hairdressing salon that she opened in the early '90s — with the park's permission, she notes — in a back room of her home. When this happened, she phoned a lawyer.

"We couldn't afford it, but we got him and we're glad we did," Charlene said. "We probably would have been bullied out of here several times over."

The attorney, Rick Watrous, notes that once he made contact with the park's attorneys, any issues were resolved quickly without going to court.

"Once they knew she wasn't going to roll over and go away, we were always able to resolve the problem," he said. "There is at least somewhat of a sense that these residents are less financially able and can be bullied.

"Obviously, Charlene couldn't be."