Tag: Bobby Cornwell

Cornwell crows about a sham victory

It’s only natural that Bobby Cornwell, president of the Florida RV Park & Campground Association, would preen about a legislative “major victory” in which he played—at best!— only a minor role; he is, after all, a politician of sorts, dependent on the association’s dues-paying members for his livelihood. Stretching the truth—and then some!—comes with the territory. But you can’t say as much for Woodall’s Campground Magazine, which at least pretends to be a journalistic product. Would that it were so, in which case its Florida readers would have some insights into what’s going on in their backyards.

I gave passing mention to Woodall’s continuing slide toward industry sycophancy a couple of posts ago, reporting on its superficial coverage of a Citrus County glampground, so there’s not much purpose in rehashing that issue here. But that was only one of the two “victories” recounted in a page 6 Woodall’s article under the assertive headline, “Florida Association Scores Major Property Tax, Development Wins,” in which Cornwell boasted of the association’s “necessary show of force” to prevent officials in two counties from “making a big mistake.”

That second averted mistake supposedly occurred in Sumter County on Aug. 22, when the county’s board of commissioners considered a proposal to increase its fire assessment fee from $124 to $323.64 a year for residents and businesses. The increase was needed, proponents said, to avoid $26 million in budget cuts for fire and ambulance services in the county as well as in The Villages, possibly the country’s largest retirement community, with which it shares emergency responders. Retirees don’t look on tax increases favorably, and they have a lot of time on their hands, so there’s no surprise that the Aug. 22 hearing was packed, passionate and ran for five hours. Cornwell’s contribution was a mere sliver of the whole. The commissioners, dutifully cowed, ended up defeating the entire proposal by a wobbly vote of 3-2.

Which, of course, didn’t resolve the underlying problem, so the cutting has already started. Sumter County’s fire chief says he’ll be laying off 30 firefighters and deep-sixing plans that had been made to hire an additional 27 employees next year. The chief of the public safety department at The Villages said he will lose 57 new positions that had been planned for next year, and has already lost three of the seven staffed ambulances the community had been leasing from American Medical Response. County officials said they’re trying to “come up with solutions.”

None of this was mentioned in Woodall’s coverage, nor in Cornwell’s public pronouncements, which would have us believe that the Florida RV Park & Campground Association had successfully repelled an attack specifically targeting RV campgrounds and not tens of thousands of homes and other businesses. Defeating the fire assessment fee “was a great night for Florida’s RV park industry,” Cornwell crowed, quite likely forestalling “similar proposals in other counties.” Yadda-yadda.

The point that Cornwell failed to explore—aside from, you know, that whole context thing—is the curiously specific number assigned to the proposed new fee: $323.64 a year according to press reports, $323.40 per RV site, according to Cornwell. Without getting into the complexities of how either number was derived, suffice to say that numerous variables were factored into the proposed fee, including ten years of actual responder histories, and the result was to be charged per single dwelling unit—which is to say, under the proposed fee schedule each site at an RV park was to be treated as a separate residence. And that, all by itself, deserves attention for at least two reasons.

Number one, it suggests that public officials are starting to view RV parks less as providing transient lodging akin to hotels and more as wheeled subdivisions, which means campground owners are seen as having a multiplicity of taxable units rather than owning just one large business entity. And number two, this shifting perspective means that RV parks are becoming recognized as an agglomeration of discrete cost centers, with separate and distinct demands on fire and rescue services, demand for road and school access and claims on other county amenities, such as libraries, community centers and landfills. Those costs have to be underwritten, and how to do that equitably without charging for each site?

Campground owners, of course, are aghast at such an idea. As Cornwell pointed out, a 200-site RV campground in Sumter County, had the proposed fee schedule passed, would have been on the hook for an annual (and additional) tax bill of $64,680. Others, pointing to a different aspect of the defeated fee that included square-foot calculations, said they would have been been hit with six-figure assessments—indeed, one unnamed campground owner with two properties told a local reporter her annual assessment would rise to $490,000.

Alarmist, perhaps—but also willfully determined not to recognize the perceptual shift that’s underway, much less how to respond in a meaningful way. It should be evident that much of this change is of the industry’s own doing, as campgrounds increasingly rent long-term sites to people who are not passing through but are, in fact, living in their RVs. And as recent events in Georgia have demonstrated, rolling back the tide in one state, however temporarily, doesn’t mean it won’t rise elsewhere—and, eventually, become an industry standard.

Next post: Monroe County, Georgia, approves a $250-a-year surcharge per RV site in its campgrounds for basic services, as it also clamps down on residents living in RVs on private land—potentially forcing some to move to those pricier RV parks, further enhancing their long-term housing attributes.

Greed and fear: the twin motivators

On returning to the U.S. after more than a month of hiking and cycling in western Europe, I’m struck by how little has changed in the domestic RV and campground industry—and how much has changed in the world it occupies, and how little it seems to care.

RVing trends that were already evident in mid-summer continued as before: softening midweek campground reservations, ongoing declines in RV production and sales, relentlessly upbeat industry assurances that any downswing was bottoming out and that 2024 will see a rebound. The natural environment within which the industry operates, on the other hand, continued to grow increasingly inhospitable (as of Oct. 10, the daily average Northern Hemisphere temperature had been at a record high for 100 consecutive days and at least 65 countries recorded their warmest Septembers on record)—and was just as resolutely ignored by RVing promoters, who much prefer to rhapsodize about the exploding growth of glamping and the latest gee-whiz innovations in RV design than to wrestle with issues of climate change and global warming.

The industry’s determination not to acknowledge the existential threat on its doorstep has been enabled by a lack of internal critics, but outside business pressures may finally crack its insularity. In recent weeks, for example, First Street Foundation issued its ninth national climate risk assessment, this time focusing on property insurance—or, more precisely, on the skyrocketing cost or outright unavailability of such insurance because of increased wildfire, flooding and windstorm risks. (I’ve written about some of First Street’s earlier assessments, here and here.) It’s a sobering read. Campground owners will feel the squeeze twice over, first through the increased expense of insurance premiums and then—if they try to sell their property—through the devaluation of their capital investment, as higher expenses mean lower net operating income and a higher cap rate.

This dynamic was further explored in a Grist article published this past Tuesday under the headline, “As climate risks mount, the insurance safety net is collapsing.” Reporting that natural disasters now cost the U.S. insurance industry $100 billion a year, the article rhetorically asks, “What happens when no one wants to pick up the tab?”

The First Street report and Grist’s article both pay particular attention to Florida because of its hurricane vulnerability, so it’s ironic that there is no more extreme example of a state’s businesses and politicians remaining stubbornly oblivious to climate change. A prime example was provided in August by Citrus County commissioners, who voted unanimously to reverse their planning commission and approve creation of the Fishcreek Glampground, despite the coastal property sitting a mere two to three feet above sea level. Bobby Cornwell, president of the Florida RV Park and Campground Association, had lobbied on behalf of the applicants and was only too happy to describe the approval as a major industry victory.

“For well over a year the owners of Fishcreek, Jen and Dimitri Magradze, have meticulously planned the project to co-exist with the beautiful natural setting and to provide outdoor enthusiasts and nature lovers with needed accommodations and access to the waterway without harming the environment,” Cornwell gushed to Woodall’s Campground Magazine. “But even though they had everything perfectly planned for their land and had many local supporters and studies showing how the project would benefit the area and not harm the environment, there was a large, organized effort against their proposal.”

Imagine that. A “large, organized effort” that Woodall’s couldn’t be bothered to describe or Cornwell to rebut, but which was rooted in the same environmental considerations that had prompted the county’s planning commission to reject the proposal not once, but twice, by votes of 5-2 and 6-1. Mere weeks later, Hurricane Idalia struck. The putative glampground’s Facebook page advised followers Sept. 3 that “there is a trailer full of logs submerged in the water along Fishcreek. Please use extreme caution when navigating out here.” So it goes.

Meanwhile, a few hundred miles north, along the coast of North Carolina in the Cape Fear region, the Leland planning board unanimously reversed its own unanimous May decision and voted to allow RV parks in flood hazard areas. The decision was urged by developer Evolve Acquisitions, which contended that it was seeking to “correct a mistake”—that the town had not really intended for flood zones to be off-limits to RV parks. As further evidence of the reasonableness of its request, Evolve’s spokesperson averred that RV parks are often located in flood-prone areas. The case for putting people in harm’s way having been put forth so cogently, the Leland town council unanimously approved the change Sept. 14.

Back when I reported on capital markets, one of my mentors stressed that market movements can be attributed to just two basic impulses: greed and fear. So it is with most things in life. Greed initially has the upper hand when developers start trotting out their honeyed visions, but as the real costs of such laissez faire policies start accumulating, fear will start coming on strong—and then watch out. You’ll be amazed how rapidly things can unravel.

Oct. 14 addendum: Inside Climate News reports that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will consider tightening protections on the West Indian manatee because of substantial scientific evidence that it faces renewed threats to its survival. Citrus County supports the state’s largest concentration of manatees in a natural spring area; the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, relatively near Fishcreek Point, was established specifically to protect manatees.

Attention, RVers: it’s brutal out there

Peace River Campground, Arcadia, FL, two days after Ian struck.

“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Those words were written by Samuel Johnson about the sentencing of an American clergyman, William Dodd. Exactly 245 years later (as of Sept. 19), they could–or should!–apply to anyone witnessing the twin ravages of Fiona and Ian, which between them tore up tens of billions of dollars in real estate, immiserated countless thousands and claimed an as-yet unmeasured loss of life. If contemplating such destruction doesn’t concentrate the collective mind, we are indeed doomed.

At this writing, the full extent of the devastation in Florida is still unknown, and the swamping of huge swaths of the southeast is just beginning. But the forlorn reports have started trickling in: “The Peace River is still rising!” announced a Facebook post from the Peace River Campground this morning. “If you had ANYTHING on the property, it’s UNDER WATER and not accessible. . . .The water is to the ceiling in the office. . . . We tried pulling campers to higher ground but the river was just too high. It’s catastrophic devastation.”

The Frog Creek RV Resort reported that it has no electricity and no certainty of when it will. “We have power lines down. Our staff is working hard to clean up the debris. Currently park is closed.” The San Carlos RV Park, meanwhile, said it had “sustained massive damage,” adding: “Our computers and records are inaccessible at this time. If you had reservations obviously that won’t happen. We will be working to refund deposits as soon as humanly possible, but please understand the immense task in front of us.”

Those and similar stories will be repeated dozens of times in the next few days, which is tragic enough. But the bigger tragedy is that they’ll be repeated next year, and the year after that–just as they were last year, and the year before that. And it’s not just hurricanes and subsequent flooding that will be the cause, or just RV parks and campgrounds along the Gulf Coast or the eastern seaboard that will be affected. Tragedy can be caused by too much water, but also by too little.

So it is that the National Interagency Fire Center announced today that 12 new large fires were reported yesterday alone, eight in Idaho and one each in Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Washington. Idaho and Montana currently have the most large fires, 59, out of 88 total across the West. To date, 6.9 million acres of U.S. land have burned in 2022, forcing thousands of evacuations and causing more than $11.2 billion in damage, according to Bankrate, an insurance website–and fire season isn’t nearly over.

Hurricanes become stronger and more frequent as ocean water gets warmer, while warmer air holds more moisture, resulting in heavier rainfall. But the same warming climate that pumps too much moisture into one part of the country is baking it out of another, causing widespread–and growing–aridification of all the states from the Central Plains west to the Pacific. The resulting tinderbox makes “enjoying the outdoors” ever more of a gamble, threatening the viability not just of camping but of fishing, as streams dry out and lakes shrink; wine making, as wildfire smoke contaminates grapes and bark beetles start killing off drought-stressed conifers and now oak trees in wine country; and farming and ranching. (As just one example of the latter, 39% of respondents to an August survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation said that wildfires have contributed to crop losses and herd sell-offs in their area in 2022.)

All of the above suggests a screaming need to reevaluate our relationship to the Great Outdoors–to “concentrate the mind wonderfully” on the hard questions reality is demanding we confront. Instead, the reflexive response, as already articulated by the Florida RV Park and Campground Association, is to pull together and rebuild and show some grit. “Our park owners and operators are some of the best people in the world,” association president Bobby Cornwell assured his members in an email today. “I have no doubt the industry will rally together and support all those in need.” Southwest Florida “will, without a doubt, be rebuilt and will be paradise once again.”

But doing more of the same, if spunky and admirable in a fatalistic sort of way, avoids the even harder work of figuring out how to avoid a repeat. It doesn’t engage the mind at all, much less concentrate it. Doing more of the same only assures an endless Groundhog Day-cycle of rebuilding and devastation and rebuilding again, until there’s no energy or money or hope left.

Poetically, both KOA and the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds will be holding their annual conventions in Orlando in November–long enough from now for a lot of the clean-up to be done, soon enough that the scars left by Ian will be inescapable. Both meetings would be ideal opportunities to examine what just happened, what is happening elsewhere in the country because of climate change, and how the campground industry could better respond to this existential threat. Ideal–but don’t count on it. That would require too much concentration.

William Dodd, it’s also worth remembering, was hanged.

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