A glampground proposal heard this past week by the Rome-Floyd County Planning Commission, Georgia, inadvertently displayed a microcosm of the problems surrounding such projects, highlighting at least three common issues. What’s surprising is that this was as innocuous a proposal as can be imagined, looking for an official thumbs-up for just seven to nine yurts—nowhere near the kind of overblown schemes that have angered local residents elsewhere (as, for example, see here, here or here.) Yet apparently no one in the county, including planners and local residents, supported a “plan” that seems less plan and more whim.
The first issue was that the glampground applicant, Andrew Devon, was long on vision and short on real-world grounding. It didn’t help that Devon kicked things off by stressing his several years of traveling around the world, “expanding himself spiritually, and learning different cultures and practices that have connected him more deeply to nature,” as reported by the Rome News-Tribune. But as became evident during Thursday’s hearing, connecting more closely to nature isn’t the same as connecting with people’s natural needs: as pointed out by Brice Wood, a county planner, the site doesn’t have access to public water or public sewer—and, apparently, no plans for a septic system or a well, either.
The omission, Wood said, had prompted “quite a few comments” from the environmental health department. One would hope so. Yet as laughable as such an omission might seem, it’s only a bit more egregiously dumb than siting campgrounds and glampgrounds in floodplains or fire-prone areas, both of which are being pursued by much bigger—and presumably more deep-pocketed—investors than the hapless Andrew Devon. But bigger doesn’t mean smarter; it just means more political clout to overcome the common-sense skeptics. And bigger, too frequently, also means dumb ideas on a grander scale because a lot of money can be fertilizer for stupidity.
The second issue highlighted by Devon’s proposal is the lack of meaningful zoning and land use regulations throughout the country that can cope with the recent explosion of camping’s many permutations. No longer confined to travel trailers and tent pads, campgrounds have morphed into a constellation of accommodations and amenities that range from backwoods sites to Disney-esque theme parks, yet in too many cases the rules governing their infrastructure, density and land-use impact are a decade or more out of date and rely on a one-size-fits-all approach—or none at all.
In Floyd County, commission members were told by Wood, the campground ordinance does not distinguish between tents, campers, RVs or cabins. Moreover, added the county planner, there are “no density restrictions” in the ordinance, so that approval of an initial nine sites “wouldn’t prevent potentially a hundred campsites” from popping up—campsites that could be filled with any combination of park models, cabins, safari tents, domes or other dwellings. And whether nine or 99 sites, Wood pointed out, Devon’s property is accessed by only a narrow gravel road that runs through several other properties, raising concerns about accessibility for emergency first responders. Nor were the owners of those properties thrilled with the idea of a sudden increase of traffic. .
That, in turn, raises the third issue common to most recent applications for new campgrounds: the predictable reaction of local property owners to the traffic, noise, safety issues and influx of strangers such developments bring to a community—and the surprising lack of local outreach by developers to address such concerns before they become problematic. Time and again, developers either show a blatant disregard for local sensitivities or seem to think they’ve done their public relations homework if they’ve schmoozed the right number of local power-brokers. Sometimes they succeed, but only if grass-roots opposition is too weak or too late in mobilizing to derail their big plans. Other times, they get handed very expensive setbacks.
In Devon’s case, despite his self-professed years of learning different cultures and practices, the one culture he apparently neglected was his own. As he told the planning commission, in a curiously passive voice as he responded to the complaints of several local residents: “If we would have had this discussion, and if you would have voiced these concerns about the safety of your children and the serious issues with the driveway, I most likely wouldn’t have even filed the permit.”
No worries there. The planning commission voted unanimously to postpone the application, giving Devon a chance to submit an actual site plan—or to just scrap the idea altogether.
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