Tag: Danville VA

A handful of updates on past posts

The end of July marks the mid-point of the traditional camping season, although that term has become increasingly elastic and even meaningless due to the distorting effects of climate change. Nevertheless, this seems like an apt moment to hit “pause,” check back on what I’ve written in the past and provide updates where appropriate. Some stories actually do reach a resolution, but many more have a way of continuing with no clear end in sight.

Ghost Town in the Sky just won’t die

One such ongoing drama has to do with Ghost Town in the Sky, a now defunct amusement park in Maggie Valley, NC about which I last wrote nearly two years ago. The property’s greatest champion, Alaska Presley, had entered into a business partnership with a Myrtle Beach-based hustler, Frankie Wood, who sweet-talked her into naming him the managing partner of their joint venture despite his shady past. In addition to contributing the property itself, Presley apparently covered all of the venture’s operating costs; Wood’s end of the deal amounted to little more than half-baked ideas drizzled with snake oil.

Then Presley died, age 98.

Inheriting Presley’s 50% stake in the partnership was her niece, Jill McClure, who cast a notably more business-like eye on its affairs. It didn’t take her long to conclude she was holding one end of a snake—and not the business end of it, either. The upshot was a lawsuit seeking to dissolve the partnership, filed in North Carolina’s Superior Court, alleging that Wood had breached his fiduciary responsibilities and thus was putting McClure’s interests at risk. Given Wood’s history to date, that would have seemed like a slam dunk.

But no. Ruling more than 18 months after the case was filed—in part because of numerous filing extensions requested by Wood, earning a judicial rebuke for “litigation by ambush” that nevertheless had no effect on the final decision—Special Superior Court Judge for Complex Business Cases Adam M. Conrad concluded in mid-May that McClure didn’t have a case. The legal arrangement to which Presley had agreed, and which McClure had inherited, clearly specified that Wood “is the sole managing member of Ghost Town in the Sky and that it has unilateral authority under the operating agreement to manage the company’s day-to-day affairs without McClure’s consent.”

That “management,” as the decision also observes, includes four years in which the venture “did not secure financing, earn income or hire employees.” Since Presley’s death, it also includes non-payment of 2022 and 2023 property taxes. No matter. As Judge Conrad sees it, there is nothing extreme enough to merit an involuntary dissolution of the partnership—which leaves Wood still at the helm, Ghost Town in the Sky even more of a moldering heap than it was four years ago, and McClure gamely telling a local reporter, “I’m moving forward with a positive attitude.”

Stay tuned.

Cacapon locals knock out two RV parks

While Maggie Valley refuses to give up the ghost, a two-fisted attempt to put an RV park in or next to Cacapon State Park, West Virginia, finally appears to have been defeated.

The first such effort, as I wrote a year ago, featured an overly cozy relationship between state officials and Blue Water Development and their efforts to build an RV campground with more than 300 sites in the state park. The proposal quickly generated fierce local opposition from park advocates and local residents, who objected to its size and the amount of traffic it would generate in a rugged area notable for its narrow roads and rustic vibe. As more details emerged of Blue Water’s backdoor maneuvering, the whole idea became politically untenable and ended up getting axed.

But that only made way for a competing proposal that had already been floated as an alternative to the state facility: a 50-acre private development adjacent to Cacapon State Park, with up to 241 sites for RVs, cabins, yurts and tents, as well as such mega-park amenities as a swimming pool, bathhouse, mini golf course, sports courts, dog parks, several pavilions and food truck areas. Ironically, as local opponents worried that the “oversized RV campground” would scar a panoramic viewshed rated by National Geographic Magazine as “one of the top 5 scenic views in the East,” the developer of the proposed campground was . . . Scenic LLC.

Despite boisterous public hearings that divided the Morgan County Planning Commission, all needed permits were approved and Scenic LLC seemed set to proceed. But then the months rolled by and nothing seemed to be happening, encouraging the opposition to renew its battle. In late June, more than two dozen local residents showed up at a planning commission meeting to demand a reconsideration, with some accusing commissioners of “selling out” the community and the commissioners responding that the project had met all county guidelines for commercial development, so what else could they do.

And then, just like that, it was over. Two weeks ago, Aaron Bills, Scenic’s principal owner, announced that he is stepping away from the project. The plan had been to seek a KOA franchise for the property, but apparently the price tag was too steep. This is “shockingly bad timing for finances,” Bills told county officials, according to the Morgan Messenger. “As a family, we’ve decided we can’t deliver on a KOA-branded campground”–indeed, he added, would the county be interested in buying the property for itself?

Danville’s casino-related RV park craps out

A 333-site Roman-themed RV park in Danville, VA, proposed last year by  J. Cubas Holdings of Coral Gables, Florida—which, not incidentally, has absolutely no experience in operating an RV park of any size, much less an avowed “high end” operation—is no more.

After the neighbors rose up in arms for any number of obvious reasons, Cubas switched gears and said early this year he’d build a bunch of new homes, priced between $300,000 and $350,000. Ironically, he’d held that out as a threat against the city if it refused to permit his RV park—only to have the city elders say that more housing is exactly what Danville needs. “Folks moving here, they need somewhere to live and there’s only so many places you can build new developments, so we’re happy to have this moving forward,” explained city councilman Lee Vogler.

Plus here’s another bonus: putting the kibbosh on Cubas’ “Palace Resort” also deep-sixed his plans for an annual biker rally that he promised would rival those of Sturgis, SD and Orlando, FL.

Reservation software getting regulatory stink-eye

As public officials learn about the price-fixing potential of algorithms used by centralized reservation software systems, first extensively detailed by ProPublica two years ago, they’ve started erecting legislative constraints at the national level. Now that’s filtered down to the local precincts: yesterday, the San Francisco board of supervisors adopted the country’s first local ordinance banning landlords from using certain software to set rents.

According to CBS News, the measure bans the sale and use of software “which combines non-public competitors’ data to set, recommend or advise on rents and occupancy levels.” Doing so, said the ordinance’s sponsor, amounts to “automated price-fixing.”

Yes, that’s only one city, and a decidedly liberal one at that. And yes, the ordinance applies to rental apartments only. But it’s not much of a leap to see how the same concerns can apply to widely shared campground reservation systems, like CampSpot, which aggregate user data and enable “individual campground owners to compare their metrics, such as average daily rates, occupancy rates and revenue per available site, with what everyone else is doing—and to make adjustments as desired.”

Sooner or later, the anti-trust police may take notice.

Frank Rolfe is at it again—but badly

Finally, scarcely more than two months after an email blast soliciting customers for his misleadingly titled RV Park University, Frank Rolfe is at it again, still hyping his “RV Park Investor’s Boot Camp.” This broadside, like the previous one, touts his 30 years of experience “building one of the largest portfolios in the U.S.”—experience that can be yours for only $997. “That’s for roughly 20 hours of video,” he writes. “And that’s a true bargain investment in your education on this sector.”

Okay. Pretty standard Frank Rolfe fare thus far. But embedded in the email is a link to a video that’s supposed to seal the deal, “Unlock RV Park Investment Success,” under the equally problematic headline, “The RV Park Boot Camp Is The Gold-Standard.” The first half of the two-minute video is Frank giving his sales pitch. The second half, without anything resembling an introduction, apparently is supposed to highlight one of Frank’s investment successes: the Mission Bell-Trade Winds RV and Mobile Home Resort, deep in the heart of Texas.

This is, as you might glean from the name, not an RV park but a long-term residential mixed-use development catering to retirees (“Homeownership Made Affordable”) and snowbirds. The residents, by all accounts, are a cheerful and welcoming bunch. The place itself is a dump, showing its age and in a generally run-down condition. Its website, where the only items under “news” urges readers to check out “the exciting events of the 2022-2023 season,” is just as outdated.

Judging by this example, Frank’s boot camp deserves the boot.

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Shady side of Caesars-linked RV park

That’s not just a tent, it’s a 40,000-square-foot temporary casino in Danville, VA. But the opportunists are already circling, including, of course, a would-be “luxury RV park” developer.

The storied city of Danville, Virginia—among its historical mileposts, it was briefly the last capital of the Confederacy—has had a bumpy ride the last couple of decades. Once a railroad hub fed by robust textile and tobacco industries, it started veering toward decay when all three of those economic pillars crumbled. A brief renaissance based on revitalizing the tourist trade foundered on the shoals of the 2008 recession, but then regained its momentum, and especially when Caesars Entertainment announced last year that it would be coming to town!

Yup. Casino gambling—coming to a town known also as “the city of churches” because of its numerous monuments to piety.

Nor will this be some minor-league operation. Caesars said it would be sinking more than half-a-billion dollars into building a resort with a 500-room hotel, a 2,500 person “entertainment venue” and 40,000 square feet of meeting and convention space, not to mention at least 1,300 slots, 85 live game tables, 24 electronic game tables, a poker room and sportsbook. Can’t wait until the grand opening late next year? No worries: Caesars last month pitched a 40,000-square-foot white tent right next to the construction site as a temporary casino, including 740 slots, 25 live table games, yada yada—not exactly to your Las Vegas standards, but just about the biggest thing to happen locally since the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee set up shop in town in 1963.

The city’s leaders are understandably giddy at the thought that their town has a shot at reclaiming some of its former vitality—but as with people, towns should be careful what they wish for. A development as big as this is the social equivalent of a black hole, warping the space around it and sucking in other objects that might otherwise have passed by harmlessly. Danville may get the economic boost it’s seeking (although there’s no guarantee of that: see Atlantic City), but the casino already has attracted less savory camp followers who may provide more tarnish than glitter.

Case in point: J. Cubas Holdings of Coral Gables, Florida, which is seeking city approval for a 333-site luxury RV park on 46 acres zoned for residential use. As detailed by developer Joe Cubas, the so-called “Palace Resort” will be Roman-themed to complement the casino and will include pools, spas, a restaurant and bar, a gym and tennis and pickleball courts. The clientele will be high-end, Cubas has said, people “who know they’re going to spend $500, $1,000, even $5,000 gambling in a weekend,” and to help them spend that money the resort also will provide a shuttle service.

But the neighbors, perhaps predictably, are not happy. Cubas’ 46-acre parcel can be accessed only by a narrow two-lane road, Jenny Lane, which they contend is ill-suited to handle an additional 650 vehicles or more—the Palace Resort sites include both an RV pad and an additional parking pad—coming and going, shuttle be damned. The increased traffic, noise, litter and impact on local wildlife associated with such a development will destroy the residential nature of the neighborhood, they told planning commissioners in a May public hearing. “We’re not opposed to a campground, we’re just opposed to one in our neighborhood,” a Jenny Lane resident told the commission. “This needs to be relocated outside of a neighborhood.”

That doesn’t sound unreasonable—except that Danville’s zoning code, presumably dating back to a time when “campground” meant a few dozen water-and-electric sites for tents and travel trailers, actually requires campgrounds and RV parks to be located in residentially-zoned areas. Indeed, Cubas has said that’s exactly why he purchased this particular site—and the planning commission, whose approval of his application appears to be mostly a formality, is on board, voting 5-1 on May 8 to submit it to the city council for final ratification. The commission’s only stipulation is that a traffic impact analysis be conducted to address local residents’ concerns.

All of that, and the city council’s anticipated approval June 20, might be chalked up to just another example of the interests of an unfortunate few being sacrificed for the greater economic good—if not for all the red flags the city is ignoring.

There is, for example, Joe Cubas’ almost complete lack of relevant experience; although he claims to have built four RV parks, none were operating last fall when he sought approval for a 454-site RV park in adjacent Pittsylvania County, his first choice before coming to Danville. As reported by the Star-Tribune, when questioned by a county supervisor about his thin résumé, an offended Cubas replied that he’d been a developer his whole life and “running an RV park is much easier than building a residential development.”

That’s a clueless and unresponsive answer, but Cubas in any case has no desire to actually run an RV park. He just wants to sell them, even before they’re built, as evidenced by his “for sale” listing Feb. 22 of a 470-site RV resort on Albemarle Sound in North Carolina that “will [emphasis added] consist of 470 sites with first class amenities.” No such RV park yet exists, however, and the listing was withdrawn May 20, presumably so Cubas could turn all his attention to Danville. Even there, however, he’s been hop-scotching: last summer he was hawking a “potential development opportunity” on the west side of Danville, a 106-acre site just inside city limits that he touted as, yes, the Palace Luxury RV Resort; that listing was up less than a month, coming down Aug. 20 as Cubas turned his attention to the ultimately denied Pittsylvania County application.

Then there’s his unbridled enthusiasm for using his luxury RV park as a springboard for much bigger promotional schemes. Making the hugely questionable assertion that “most RVers also own motorcycles,” Cubas disclosed in his permit application that he’s been in discussions with Thunder Road Harley Davidson and unnamed city officials to have Danville host a bike week in 2025. That could mean really big bucks for Danville, according to the application, which cited the Sturgis, S.D. and Orlando, Fla. annual biker rallies as examples of what is possible; no estimate provided of what proportion of those half-million visitors could be described as “high-end,” or whether Danville—population 42,000—has either the room or the resources to cope with such a tidal wave.

But the biggest red flag, the one that attests to Joe Cubas’ questionable scruples, is his threat to stick it to the city if it denies his permit by . . . building between 92 and 230 single-family homes on his 46 acres. Those new homes obviously will impact city services, his application pointed out, and just one of those impacts would be as much as a $1.5 million annual hit to school budgets to accommodate all those new students. The RV resort, by contrast, “will have no impact on the city’s or county’s social services”—an assertion that ignores police, fire and other tax-funded services—but “will potentially generate in excess of $1.3 million dollars [sic] a year in transient lodging, occupancy and meal tax revenue for the City of Danville.”

That’s a pretty blatant economic threat, especially coming from a Floridian whose avowed interest in southern Virginia is to capitalize on a casino, not to provide housing in an area to which he has no ties. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that gambling fever encourages: a get-rich-quick attitude that isn’t limited to slot machines or card tables. Even a Roman-themed RV luxury park will suffice, especially if it’s easy-in and easy-out. The locals, as usual, can pick up the pieces.

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