Tag: dome glampground

Bubble, bubble, glamping trouble

The glamping industry’s propensity to over-reach, an affliction from which not even the biggest corporate players are immune, currently is on vivid display in the Maine town of Lamoine. What started as an overly ambitious proposal to build a subdivision of geodesic domes has galvanized so much local opposition that the town is now considering a six-month moratorium on any new lodging—and conceivably could kill the proposal altogether. If that happens, call it death by hubris.

The offender in this case is Clear Sky Resort, an Arizona-based developer that wants to plop scores of plastic bubbles on a coastal stretch of Maine, the use of which could be purchased for several hundred dollars a night per bubble. All that must have seemed quite reasonable from a distance of 2,000 miles, but for some significant percentage of the 1,800 or so residents of Lamoine, none of whom would get a piece of the action, it sounded more like an invitation for a whole lot of strangers to come parading through town, trampling the coastal wetlands and disrupting the quiet that locals have treasured. People started talking. Petitions were drafted. Lawyers were hired.

And before you know it, things started unraveling. Although Clear Sky initially secured a conditional go-ahead from the local planning board, the opposition soon discovered that Clear Sky hadn’t bothered to apply for permits required to disturb coastal wetlands—a prerequisite for seeking the planning board’s consideration. Having put the cart ahead of the horse, Clear Water also had run out the clock on meeting certain purchase obligations, and therefore couldn’t demonstrate that it actually owns the land it wants to develop—another prerequisite for local review, not to mention evidence of an alarming lack of attention to detail.

And then, just to cap it all, the entire grand scheme provoked so much opposition that the town now is contemplating a six-month moratorium while Lamoine’s residents and officials review town ordinances with an eye toward aligning them more closely with the town’s 2020 comprehensive plan. That plan, a 145-page document, stresses the area’s rural nature and its residents’ desire to encourage small businesses and home occupations. It most definitely frowns on large tourist accommodations, calling for the prohibition of hotels and motels in rural and agricultural zones—which is to say, anywhere outside of the town core. And compliance with its vision almost certainly will put an end to Clear Sky’s ambitions in the area.

Derailing Clear Sky’s plans might have seemed improbable even a few years ago, when tourism development was widely welcomed as an economic shot in the arm by many struggling rural communities. More recently, however, the growing scale and intensity of RV parks and glampgrounds have disrupted the very attractions their promoters claim to be enshrining. And just as extractive industries like mining and lumbering siphon away an area’s riches while returning little to local residents, the new megaparks—with their restaurants and recreational amenities—capture most of the spending their visitors generate.

Small wonder, then, that more communities are calling a time-out while they wrestle with an unexpected inflow of disruptive investment capital. A six-month moratorium similar to the one Lamoine is considering was adopted in nearby Tremont a couple of years ago, prompted by a proposal for a 154-site “luxury campground”; the result was strict new standards for future campground developments, including size restrictions and spacing requirements. A long-running—and largely bogus—attempt to revive a failed amusement park and associated RV facilities in Maggie Valley, N.C. resulted in a political maelstrom two years ago and a subsequent six-month moratorium while the town developed a “smart growth” set of guidelines.

Other towns and counties are likewise recognizing that their ordinances and zoning regulations have not kept pace with a rapidly changing campground industry. The idea of a rustic natural setting for a few dozen campground trailers, providing families with a couple of days to enjoy fresh air and a natural vibe, has become laughably quaint. Even the initial “glamping” push, in which a traditional campground would be augmented by a handful of yurts or safari tents equipped with beds and minimal furnishings, has morphed into upscale villages of plush accommodations that really amount to nothing more than canvas-sided dispersed resort rooms—yet all still regulated by decades-old rules that never contemplated the creation of such instant subdivisions.

It’s against that backdrop that Lamoine’s residents will be attending a public hearing August 1 to discuss the proposed moratorium, followed by a vote on Aug. 15. Passage of the moratorium is not assured, but given Clear Sky’s missteps to this point, I wouldn’t want to bet against the irate local residents who are marshaling the “yes” vote.

Aug. 17 update: The moratorium was approved two nights ago by the overwhelming vote of 397-2. See here (end of post) for a brief summary.

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Maine ponders dome glampground

Is this what Buckminster Fuller envisioned when he invented the geodesic dome? The Clear Sky Resort, south of Grand Canyon National Park, could be mistaken for an alien pod invasion.

The bastard child known as “glamping,” which embraces the dissonant conceit that we can get closer to “nature” by keeping it at arm’s length, continues to gather momentum. New glampgrounds are popping up helter-skelter like mushrooms after a wet spell, frequently clustered near the nation’s most iconic natural resources, with ever larger footprints and ever more tricked-up amenities—all while promising that “campers” don’t have to suffer the discomforts that come with actually immersing themselves in the natural world.

One such budding enterprise, dubbed Clear Sky Acadia, is lurching after acceptance in the Maine town of Lamoine. First mentioned in this blog in January as a potential competitor for KOA’s Terramor Resort in Bar Harbor, the Clear Sky proposal survived several regulatory meetings and reviews before finally getting planning board clearance May 1. But it still has to be approved by the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, and more immediately, the proposal faces a public hearing June 5 that may not go well.

There is, for one thing, a growing local resistance to the increased commercialization of coastal Maine. Although a long-favored vacation destination, the area around Acadia National Park has become so overrun with tourists that local residents are being gentrified right out of their homes. Bar Harbor recently capped the number of short-term rentals to preserve as much housing as possible, but that simply pushed investors into other, nearby towns that haven’t yet followed suit. The nearby town of Tremont, meanwhile, last year overwhelmingly approved an extensive revision of its land use ordinance to impose the strictest campground regulations on Mount Desert Island, including a minimum RV site size of 5,000 square feet—or nearly double the size of the most generous RV sites at most campgrounds.

Then there’s the Clear Sky proposal itself, which is as intrusive an addition to the natural terrain as a subdivision in a cornfield. The company’s signature accommodations are geodesic domes, which have a nice eco-friendly aura about them and which feature clear plastic windows through which guests can gaze at the awesomeness of the great outdoors. But these are not modest structures: for guest quarters, Clear Sky Acadia would have 38 domes that are 23 feet in diameter, 50 with a 26-foot diameter, and two at 33 feet across and 16 feet high, each with more square footage than two park models. That’s huge—but not as massive as a proposed “wedding dome” of 1,900 square feet; a main activity dome and a spa dome, each at 3,400 square feet; and a restaurant/check-in dome of 6,500 square feet. There also would be various “accessory activity” domes, as well as domes for housing 36 employees, all of it adding up to 105 boils and pimples on the Maine landscape.

It’s worth noting that this would be only the third Clear Sky facility built and operated by Hal Feinberg, an Arizona-based real estate agent who decided—as described in an undated magazine interview—to create a resort providing guests with an “authentic backpacking adventure inside a very personal dome that puts them in touch with nature.” The Lemoine project would be significantly larger than either of those first two ventures, both opened just two years ago, including a 16-dome facility about 16 miles outside of Glacier National Park and a 45-dome resort about 20 minutes south of Grand Canyon National Park. The Glacier Clear Sky Resort, which racked up a litany of shabby reviews complaining about mold, crappy service, duct-taped tears in the windows and inadequate heating for such a northern location, is no longer accepting reservations.

Despite an emphasis on providing guests “an unforgettable experience” with “uniquely styled and themed Sky Domes surrounded by unspoiled nature,” the Clear Sky Resort in Arizona clearly doesn’t believe that nature is enough of a draw. Not when you’re charging upwards of $400 a night and nature can be had for free by anyone who actually seeks out an “authentic backpacking adventure.” So those “uniquely styled and themed” domes, a mash-up of Las Vegas and Disneyland, include an “’80s Video Games” dome, a “Pink” themed dome and a “British Secret Agent” dome, which includes Goldfinger-inspired chairs and a London phone booth. The top of the heap is the “Space Galaxy” dome, which sleeps seven and can run as high as $610 for the night, but the real winner has to be the “Stairway to the Stars” dome: it only sleeps two. In a round, queen-sized bed. Suspended from the ceiling. Accessed by a spiral staircase.

Glampers opting for the Stairway to the Stars are cautioned that the bed “will sway slightly” as its occupants move about.

Thus far, there’s little indication whether the Lamoine property would continue the “uniquely styled and themed” approach, nor whether Feinberg has learned from his missteps in Montana how better to combat moisture buildup in his domes—not to mention the challenge of heating and cooling such large interior volumes. (A sphere has the largest volume-to-surface-area ratio of any geometric form, and a dome is roughly half a sphere.) One could argue that such concerns are his problem, and that’s true in the short term. But the American countryside is littered with disintegrating former motels and shopping malls, and these days even office buildings in large urban cores are sitting vacant and facing an uncertain future, and all required considerably more capital investment per square foot than goes into a glampground.

All of which is another way of saying that it’s far easier to walk away from a glampground, and if such projects go bust, they become a community problem—and eventually a blight on the community.

None of this is likely to come up at next week’s public hearing, which is in any case a curiously ambivalent exercise. The planning board already has said it won’t be taking any action June 5, seeking only to determine if it needs additional information about the proposal before taking final action June 19. Feinberg’s representatives, meanwhile, have indicated they believe they’ve already threaded the needle and plan on making only the briefest of public presentations. It remains to be seen if anyone questions the applicant’s expertise or depth of financial reserves, or the physical challenges that domes have to overcome in northern states. These are not issues that planning boards tend to examine—may not even have the authority to consider—but perhaps they should.

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