Here’s a rule of thumb for understanding how well an organization can identify its core mission: the more abstract and non-specific its name, the more muddled its messaging and the more unmoored its members become.
Take, for example, the California Travel Park Association (CTPA), birthed in 1975 with a name that identified its geographic focus (California) and the nature of its membership (an association), but most critically its constituents: travel parks—what we think of today as campgrounds and RV parks, and most definitely not trailer parks.
Thirty-three years later, however, CTPA had become a member of the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds (ARVC), and in a fit of solidarity, renamed itself the California Association of RV Parks & Campgrounds, or CalARVC. Fair enough. But when it decided in 2019 that it no longer wanted to have anything to do with ARVC, CalARVC had to change its name again—and thus was born the word salad known as CampCalNOW RV Park and Campground Alliance. No explanation for the bold “NOW.” No explanation for the conversion from association to alliance, either, or what that meant, but at least the RV parks and campgrounds were still getting acknowledged.
But fast-forward another three years, and it’s obvious someone got tired of lugging around that ponderous name plate. Or as explained on its website, “In 2022 CampCalNOW reexamined its branding and how that measured up with the associations [sic] goals for the future, taking into account the complexity of today’s advocacy efforts and the importance of unity within our industry, and settled on today’s name, the California Outdoor Hospitality Association.”
Back to being an association? Check. A continued focus on California? Check. But “RV parks and campgrounds”? Gone. Tossed into the same semantic trash heap that had already claimed “travel parks,” replaced by the mealy-mouthed “outdoor hospitality” umbrella.
So who cares? What difference does it make?
To answer that, mull over the muddled and even incoherent call to arms issued by CalOHA president Dyana Kelley this past week. In a message distributed to her members and published in RVBusiness and Woodall’s Campground Magazine, Kelley obscurely laments what she describes as “RV parks . . . being bookended into a death spiral,” with the following introductory paragraph, copied here in its entirety (including missing punctuation):
“Historically, RV parks and campgrounds tend to fly under the radar avoiding some of those bills that wreak havoc on our counterparts, in the mobile home space however as more RV parks are moving to an extended stay model our industry is now suddenly being included in everything from Narcan dispensing, fee transparency, rent control, affordable housing bills and even updating the Special Occupancy Parks Act (SOPA).”
Which, if I understand her correctly, means that Kelley acknowledges that her state’s RV parks increasingly are less about “outdoor hospitality” and more about being residential facilities—trailer courts more than travel parks. But that’s a problem, because state legislators therefore increasingly expect RV parks to conform to the same regulations as are applied to mobile home parks. All that those myopic legislators see, Kelley wrote, “is parks filled with long-term residents. Without context, independent RV parks have taken on the look of affordable housing but what isn’t seen is that parks provide a service to the community,” she continued. “They house teachers for a season, line workers bringing new power, traveling nurses and even state legislators.”
In other words, what’s important is not how long someone lives in an RV in a particular facility, but why. Rules about fee transparency or Narcan dispensing or what-have-you should be applied only to those parks or campgrounds where people are living because that’s what they can afford, not so they can “provide a service to the community.” Or as Kelley explicitly notes, “Little understanding is given to the ‘intent’ by which a traveler chooses to stay at a park, and they [state legislators] are blissfully ignorant of the role RV parks play in supporting travel and tourism during the winter months when our parks fill with snowbirds.”
There are so many things wrong with this convoluted logic that it’s hard to figure out where to start unpacking it. There is, for starters, the astonishingly frank admission that California’s RV parks are in fact, and by choice, becoming less recreational and more residential in nature—yet in CalOHA’s view, at least, those parks should not have to comply with residential regulations despite that evolution. That’s like saying that the rules allowing a small home business to operate in a residential area should still apply when it becomes a large workshop, and then a small factory. At what point do we acknowledge that a shade-tree mechanic has become a full-service garage, or that a seamstress is now operating a dress shop and fabric store?
Then there’s Kelley’s fallback position, which in essence amounts to a thorny “intent” litmus test. We have to ask “why” all these people are staying nine months or a year or two years in the same RV park, and depending on the answer, may conclude that normal residential rules should not apply to a particular RV park despite the appearance of permanence. Just how that determination would be made, Kelley hasn’t said. Nor has she indicated what minimum number of “community service” residents would be sufficient to give an RV park a pass: 20% of the residents? 50%? 70%?
There’s lots more than can be said, but I don’t want to get snarky. Suffice to say that what it all boils down to is that CalOHA and its members apparently want to have their cake and eat it, too: to “fly under the radar” as campgrounds without having to conform to the same rules as their “counterparts in the mobile home space,” even as they increasingly—even blatantly—get “filled with long-term residents.” But while there are numerous reasons for this shifting business model, it’s all made easier by the fact that CalOHA has taken its eye off the ball. Instead of pushing back against the adulteration of its original brand—of promoting RV parks and campgrounds qua RV parks and campgrounds, not as alternative housing—CalOHA has embraced the vacuous notion of “outdoor hospitality.”
Which, apparently, means whatever CalOHA says it means.
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