Nearly all tenants are out of the Newport News airport’s trailer park. Here’s what’s next.

The trailer park at Newport News/Williamsburg International Airport is nearly empty after the weekend deadline for tenants to vacate the property.

Only three residents remain.

Josiah Gayle — who’s lived in the park for 35 years — was still residing at the park Monday, in his trailer on the park’s outer edge.

Though all tenants were supposed to leave by midnight Saturday, the airport gave the 65-year-old Gayle, who suffers from significant health issues, an extra week.

“He needs a little more help,” Airport Executive Director Mike Giardino said. “We’re trying to be compassionate toward people, especially when they’ve got special circumstances.”

But for most, Saturday marked the final exodus from the Patrick Henry Mobile Home Park. The Peninsula Airport Commission, which owns the property, announced the park’s closure in May and has been pushing to get tenants off the property ever since, including offering stipends to entice tenants to leave early.

The process has been heart-wrenching for many who have been unable to move their aging trailers out of the park and struggled to find new housing.

Giardino said the United Way has arranged for housing for Gayle, and he’s “finally accepted that help.” But the new home won’t be ready until next week.

Still, Gayle said he’s unhappy about having to move from his home of more than three decades. “I’m homeless,” he said tersely. “They took everything I got.”

Only one other trailer is still occupied — a couple was planning to have their trailer moved, but learned at the last minute that it couldn’t be. The airport gave them a few more days to find something else, Giardino said.

“They’re nice people, and they’ve always been great tenants,” he said. “Their circumstances changed at the last minute, and we want to help them.”

But everyone else is gone, Giardino said, and the airport doesn’t expect to have to take anyone to court to force them out.

Many tenants — even those who stayed until the end — have gotten $4,000 to move, he said. That includes $2,000 for their trailer title and $2,000 to actually vacate. That was on top of free rent and water for six months between May 5 and Nov. 5.

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of tenants lost trailers they owned outright, plus any money they pumped into the homes over the years. Some residents told the Daily Press they invested tens of thousands of dollars into rehabbing their properties.

It’s a relief, Giardino said, that “the process that needed to take place” is now reaching a conclusion.

“But there’s a human aspect to it,” he said. “And I think we did the best we could under the circumstances. It was about compassion and humanity while doing the right thing from the legal perspective.”

The 75-acre park has been around since at least the 1950s. Tenants owned the trailers, paying $461 a month in recent years for the lot fee, water and trash. The 77 trailers on site in May was down from just under 100 homes on the site three years ago. There were some 250 mobile homes on the property in its 1995 heyday.

Giardino deemed the closure necessary, saying the airport couldn’t afford to upgrade the park’s aging infrastructure after years of neglect. The financially struggling airport, he said, could no longer afford to keep up with the Band-Aid fixes increasingly needed. He said it would cost millions to make needed improvements to water lines and stormwater drainage systems.

While a handful of trailers have been successfully moved out, Giardino said the airport will have the remaining trailers destroyed.

If there’s scrap metal that can be salvaged, he said, the airport will go through the proper government protocol for that. For cars and anything else that’s left, he said, “it’s abandoned property, and we’ll dispose of it properly.”

As for the many stray cats still left at the park, Giardino said that issue will be addressed just like the other felines found living elsewhere at the airport.

“They will all be dealt with humanely,” he said.

Manny Aguilar, 29, was at the park on Monday morning with his wife, Melanie, and two of his boys — aged 2 and 4 — getting some last items out.

That included a white utility van that doesn’t run and sat dormant for months. Aguilar attached some chains to it, with the couple then using their large GMC pickup to yank it out of its resting spot.

Over the weekend, Aguilar spray painted “PHTP 4 Life” in large black lettering on his trailer. That stands for “Patrick Henry Trailer Park for Life,” he said.

That’s in honor of what the park has meant to him and his family. He grew up in the park, living there since he was 10 after his parents moved here from Mexico, and his parents still lived there a couple trailers down.

Aguilar and his wife and kids are moving into a condo in Denbigh, paying nearly four times the airport’s monthly trailer fees. But Aguilar said he’s “sad as a dad” that he no longer owns his family’s home.

Two of his neighbors, he said, destroyed their own trailers over the weekend. They had rented a forklift to move some sheds, and used the machine to tear down their trailers, too.

“They didn’t want to give the airport the pleasure of doing it,” Aguilar said.

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com