Tag: Hipcamp

ARVC/OHI: adrift without a rudder

The organization formerly known as the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, or ARVC, is having one heck of an identity crisis.

Last November, supposedly after a year of vaguely referenced “surveys and interviews,” the association’s leadership announced that it was “rebranding” itself and henceforth would be known as Outdoor Hospitality Industry, or OHI. That awkward word jumble without a subject noun was explained away by ARVC/OHI’s executive director, Paul Bambei, as marking the association’s transition toward becoming “the trusted voice of all outdoor hospitality.”

Delusions of grandeur, anyone?

While Bambei and his enablers thus laid claim to global aspirations for their modest little industry association, ARVC’s dues-paying members couldn’t help but notice that they had been disappeared. An organization originally founded “for the purpose of promoting camping through the private sector and protecting the camping industry from unfair legislation and unfair competition” apparently had decided that “camping” was—what? Too old-school? Too limiting? Just not as focus-group attractive as “outdoor hospitality”? Whatever the case, “campgrounds” and “RV parks” seemed to have ceased as an integral part of the organization’s identity.

Predictably, the grumbling soon started. Critics pointed out that the outdoor hospitality industry’s “trusted voice” presumably would be speaking on behalf of not just campgrounds, RV parks and glampgrounds but also bed-and-breakfasts, inns, ski lodges, marinas, resorts and even hotels and motels if they were in any way connected to the “outdoors.” Worse yet, the new “outdoor hospitality” umbrella would cover Harvest Hosts, Boondockers Welcome and Hipcamp, long seen by many campground owners as unfair competitors who don’t have to comply with RV park licensing requirements. How would all these disparate businesses have their conflicting interests represented by a single voice except in the most abstract sense?

Less than a month later, the grumbling became more serious when the Pennsylvania Campground Owners Association voted to quit its partnership with OHI. The national organization’s “mission and vision” no longer aligned with its own, PCOA leadership explained, adding that its members had grown increasingly concerned about OHI’s lack of communications and transparency about various changes it was implementing.

Decisive though it was, however, PCOA actually was slow on the uptake: ARVC/OHI had been signaling its intentions at least a year earlier, with little apparent pushback—and, indeed, may have been emboldened by the muted response. Early last year, for example, I wrote a three-part post making the case that ARVC had lost its way. (Indeed, in an ironic foreshadowing, I suggested at the end of the second installment that “perhaps it should rebrand as the National Association of the Outdoor Hospitality Industry.”) I observed at the time that ARVC had adopted a “mission statement” that was couched “in soulless corporate-speak,” to wit: “We empower outdoor hospitality businesses by providing industry-tailored resources, organic connections, consumer exposure, professional development, and proactive legislative action.” 

This past week, apparently in belated response to PCOA’s secession, ARVC/OHI backpedaled furiously. According to its press release, because the new mission statement neglected to explicitly identify its “core membership,” the wording would be changed to the following: “To empower RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses with the community, resources, professional development, and legislative advocacy needed to ensure successful futures for all Outdoor Hospitality Industry businesses.” (The new wording, it added, is to be approved at ARVC/OHI’s board meeting this spring—raising the question of just who decided this is a good idea that should be announced before board approval.)

No mention of the name change to OHI and its silence on the subject of camping. No mention of OHI’s “vision” statement—“an empowered outdoor hospitality industry”—also cited by PCOA as a point of contention.

The proposed new mission statement is known as trying to have your cake and eat it, too. As with most such efforts, however, it fails as a semantic construct, since there is no logical connection between empowering RV parks, campgrounds and glamping businesses on the one hand, and ensuring the successful futures of all outdoor hospitality businesses on the other. The “empowering” of a part does not ensure the success of the whole. On the other hand, the way this sentence is constructed, its unmistakable meaning is that RV parks and campgrounds need to up their game so that the outdoor hospitality industry as a whole can thrive.

Bambei, meanwhile, proved himself just as fuzzy-minded as the organization he leads by insisting in the press release that the core constituency he serves really hasn’t changed, “it’s simply expanded.” Which is not unlike saying our little town of New Amsterdam really hasn’t changed, it’s simply expanded—into New York City. 

But logical thinking and precise language aren’t the point: muddying the waters is. Whatever he may say after the fact about his primary concern for ARVC/OHI’s “core,” Bambei just can’t keep his grandiose ambitions from spilling into the open—and so, in that same press release, he goes on to to declare that “we know it is important that the hospitality industry has a national organization positioned to represent it well into the future.” And so, by golly, the RV park and campground industry might as well shoulder that burden on behalf of all those other unrepresented businesses. With Bambei at its helm, of course.

PCOA’s secession apparently had another, more salutary effect: almost simultaneously with its announced mission restatement, OHI’s board voted to allow direct RV park and campground membership across the United States. In doing so, it ended a much-criticized requirement that campgrounds in partnering states—like Pennsylvania—could belong to ARVC only if they first joined the state organization. (On the flip side, campgrounds that belonged to a partnering state association were in most cases required to pay national dues even if they didn’t want to be ARVC members.) That compulsory package deal was so unpopular that the country’s biggest state associations had been seceding from ARVC, one by one, with Pennsylvania’s departure the final straw.

But while long overdue, this change means that OHI will relinquish having captive dues-payers delivered by compliant state associations and will have to actually earn those members by convincing them it has their best interests at heart—a daunting prospect for an organization increasingly criticized for being out of touch with its grassroots and given to top-down decision-making. That, as much as any dreams of representing a vaguely defined but overarching “hospitality industry,” explains why ARVC/OHI seems so unmoored these days.

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In Colorado, camping on private land

As the American landscape gets overrun by a tidal wave of RVs, governing bodies ranging from the Bureau of Land Management to cities as large as Los Angeles to rural towns and counties are scrambling to manage the onslaught. Improper disposal of human waste always looms large as the biggest problem, but other concerns include illegal tapping of power lines, fire hazards posed by open fires, and slum-like conditions caused by garbage, trash and broken appliances.

But forcing RVers on city streets and public lands to disperse, in addition to courting legal and constitutional challenges, can be an exercise in whack-a-mole because of the lack of alternatives. Commercial campgrounds frequently are too expensive and too full, cheaper public campgrounds often are booked months in advance, and boondocking sites are either rare (east of the Mississippi) or have become so heavily impacted by over-use that they periodically get shut down for remediation. Pushing RVs out of one location simply shifts the problem to another, in a merry-go-round of 21st century urban blight.

What’s to be done? One possible solution is being worked out in Chaffee County, Colorado, some 70 miles due west of Colorado Springs. A rural county of some 20,000 residents, long on recreational opportunities and light on industry, Chaffee County’s board of supervisors recently adopted an agritourism-friendly ordinance allowing primitive commercial camping on private land—the kind of camping that many localities around the country explicitly prohibit, while others try to ignore altogether. A second ordinance, scheduled for a vote Jan. 10, would establish similar allowances for workforce camping on private land.

Chaffee’s new rules are part of an attempt to provide its farmers and ranchers, many of whom are struggling economically, with an additional income stream. “It’s never been harder to make a living off the land,” county commissioner Keith Baker said in a news release announcing the ordinance. “Expanding economic opportunities for rural landowners in Chaffee by allowing for well-regulated, small-scale private land camping is a huge win for our community” and will “reduce pressure on public lands.”

To its credit, the new ordinance does impose some regulations in a largely unregulated arena. Landowners who wish to accommodate campers in RVs, tents or vans must get an annual permit for a commercial campsite of at least 900 square feet (600 square feet for tents-only sites) on a minimum of five acres. Additional sites, to a maximum of ten sites on a minimum of 100 acres, are allowed, provided there are “no permanent improvements, facilities or lodging material outside of water, sanitation facilities, and/or fire mitigation elements.”

Yup—that means no electric hookups. And “sanitation facilities” may mean no more than disposing of sewage “off-site by way of personal waste facilities, such as wag bags [basically doggie bags for humans, designed primarily for backcountry hiking], RV holding tanks, or portable toilets.”

There are a few other requirements, notably that the property owner (or “assigned caretaker”) must be available within a 60-minute radius of all occupied campsites at all times, as well as a limit of 10 such sites per property owner, regardless of how many properties are owned or how big they may be. All such sites must have quiet hours of 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. And the sites must have signs “to educate guests on current fire ban status, campfire safety, Leave No Trace principles, and quiet hours.”

But Chaffee’s regulation pales next to the regulatory, licensing, taxing and inspection regimen that commercial RV parks and campgrounds face, with all their associated costs and time demands. For many commercial campground owners, the kind of licensing Chaffee County has authorized is unfair competition at best, an existential threat at worst. Moreover, it won’t help their disposition one bit that the new ordinance was championed by Hipcamp, which along with Harvest Hosts has internet listings of thousands of camping possibilities on private land, from farms to vineyards to ranches and breweries.

One acknowledgment of this sensitivity can be read in the December issue of Woodall’s Magazine, in which editor Ben Quiggle speculates that the Chaffee County measure “could lead to even more municipalities looking at similar ordinances,” even as he notes that Hipcamp “for years has drawn the ire of many park owners” for precisely this kind of camping. Although he concludes that “it may be time” for park owners “to think about how more individuals opening up their spaces for a small number of campers may impact their businesses,” most park owners won’t think about it at all—their response will be an immediate and reflexive “No way!”

It doesn’t help that approval of the ordinance flew under the radar of the National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, which is headquartered just outside Denver—almost next door to Chaffee, by Western standards—and which held its national convention just a month after the vote. If ever there were an opportune time to examine a potentially pace-setting development affecting the entire industry, that would have been it, a chance for ARVC to lead a measured discussion on an issue affecting its entire membership.

That didn’t happen, and meanwhile, the pressure on other counties and municipalities to adopt a similar approach will only increase. And as tens of thousands of low income, disabled or seasonal workers turn to RVs as their housing of last resort, recreational RVers will encounter ever more competition for a limited inventory of places to park their wheels.

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