Tag: Mariposa KOA

When big RV parks face Big Weather

Extreme weather season, exemplified by forest fires, hurricanes and tornadoes, is upon us, and in its crosshairs are three of the biggest RV park proposals ever conceived. Yet one of those projects has given no indication that it’ll be deterred by something so banal, a second is officially still on track but threatened by non-weather related developments, and the third has gone AWOL.

The AWOL project is KOA’s proposal for two camping resorts on more than 900 acres straddling State Highway 140, a major access road to Yosemite National Park. The two resorts were to have more than 400 RV pads, 25 to 50 tent sites, 80 to 90 “conditioned glamping units” under KOA’s Terramor label, abundant amenities and a workforce of approximately 100, also housed at the site. In other words, KOA’s plans called for constructing the equivalent of a small town with a peak population comparable to that of the nearby existing town of Mariposa.

Or at least that’s what KOA was proposing, well more than two years ago (more context here, here and here). A preapplication it filed in early 2022 was followed that June by a “coffee and conversation” meeting with local residents that was supposed to assuage their apprehensions but raised more questions then it answered. Mere weeks after that, in late July, the Oak Fire sprang up almost literally next door and swept through 19,000 acres—less than a mile west of the even larger Ferguson Fire of 2018, which had ravaged 97,000 acres. KOA thereupon fell silent on the whole grand scheme, neither following up on its preapplication nor announcing it was dropping its plans.

This week the fire came roaring in from the other side, and while at this writing the French Fire is still considerably smaller than its nearby predecessors, it’s fierce enough to put the entire town of Mariposa under a mandatory evacuation order. A video on Facebook showed “the entire mountain above the high school” on fire, State Highway 140 was closed on Thursday and approximately 3,500 customers had lost electric power as of yesterday. This afternoon the blaze was nearing 1,000 acres but also was 25% contained, raising hopes that further damage could be limited.

Still, this will hardly be the end of it. Yesterday’s heat in California was so extreme that Palm Springs hit a record 124 degrees, a Death Valley extreme—or was, once upon a time. Fourteen wildfires have ignited in California in the first five days of July; 145,000 acres have burned in the state this year, which is more than four times the five-year average for this date. One can only hope that KOA’s brain trust, reluctant though it might be to overcome institutional inertia, is looking at the same statistics and trend lines and concluding that no, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all. And maybe at some point they’ll let everybody else know the same thing.

Elsewhere, as Hurricane Beryl plowed across the Yucatan Peninsula and seemed poised to hit Texas tomorrow night, coastal residents could console themselves with the thought that at least it no longer was the Category 4 and 5 storm it had been when it thrashed Jamaica, Barbados and other Caribbean islands. Yet Beryl already has made history as the earliest Category 5 ever to form in the Atlantic, and its early emergence portends an especially active and severe hurricane season that should put all Gulf Coast communities on high alert.

But that seems to be of no concern to the developers of a 400-acre RV park in Jackson County, Mississippi, who early last month defeated a court challenge to their plans filed by nearby property owners concerned that the development would “destroy the residential nature” of their community. Those neighbors aren’t necessarily wrong: Ocean Springs Islands RV Resort is projected to include 476 RV sites, 20 rental Airstreams, 16 elevated “tree houses,” a lazy river and a whole lot more, and all accessed by a single two-lane road that connects the two halves of that larger community, Gulf Park Estates. That means there’s going to be a lot of new people in town, and a lot of new traffic running through that narrow bottleneck.

Yet even as the court hearing was in progress, workers at the resort site were still cleaning up debris from Hurricane Katrina—from 2005. Seven years prior to that, Hurricane Georges had rolled over the property with a 10-foot storm surge (more context here). Nothing surprising in any of that, given that the site sits on a flood zone on Davis and Simmons bayous and the Mississippi Sound. But local residents, presumably because they face the same dangers and therefore are as willfully unable to confront them, couched their objections entirely in terms of zoning regulations. Of the increasingly high possibility of devastating winds and floods, not a word. Of the mayhem that will result when all those new neighbors try to evacuate along the same narrow road as the old neighbors, also not a word.

Finally, the hubristic $2.5 billion American Heartland Theme Park and Resort—to include the 320-acre, 750-site Three Ponies RV Park and Campground—dodged several weather bullets the past couple of months despite being sited smack in the middle of a busy tornado thoroughfare in northeastern Oklahoma (more context here). The bullet it didn’t miss? A $5.5 million lien filed by a Canadian firm the developers had hired to design the mammoth project, for allegedly unpaid invoices for work it had done through January. The filing came as the Oklahoma legislature was considering a $35 million request from the city of Vinita to upgrade its utilities to accommodate the project, so not a good look.

The allegedly unpaid work, coupled with a 25% increase in projected costs, lagging construction and unspecified delays in the completion date, have only increased skepticism that the developers—who have no previous amusement park experience—are in over their heads. “I hate to see the governments and the local communities and people spend a lot of money and get behind this because it’s just not realistic,” Dennis Spiegel, chief executive of International Theme Park Services, told a local news outlet. “It just won’t work there, OK? I’ve done this all my life. . . . And we do feasibility studies all the time, and we know the market. It just isn’t there.”

All of which may well be true, but which again avoids acknowledging the even more sobering facts on the ground: that Vinita has a tornado index value of 352.83, or two-and-a-half times the U.S. average, and just might not be the place you’d want 3,000 people setting up their travel trailers. It is, however, entirely consistent with an industry that despite being built around the idea of getting people into the Great Outdoors, pays little to no heed to what the Great Outdoors may do to them. Moreover, it’s also an industry that keeps thinking bigger is better, or at least more profitable, and so those efforts include piling up more people in a more concentrated area, with predictably greater carnage when the inevitable happens.

At some point, maybe we’ll recognize that something fundamentally different is going on—something that requires us to think and make decisions in a fundamentally different way.

Most recent posts

KOA gives up on explaining itself

Following the public relations debacle KOA created for itself earlier this year, when it finally threw in the towel over its misbegotten idea for a glampground in New York’s Catskills, the campground juggernaut apparently has decided to zip its corporate lip. Whereas it once boldly proclaimed development plans for its Terramor brand of glamping resorts, currently still limited to a single facility in Maine opened in 2020, KOA is now saying nothing at all about two projects still in the hopper, or whether it has plans for additional sites.

Of the two ongoing projects, the more likely to succeed appears to be a $28.5 million Terramor planned for the Adirondacks, in upstate New York. As reported here back in January, the proposed 80-site glampground would avoid much of the controversy KOA generated in the Catskills by repurposing an existing KOA campground in Wilmington instead of developing a brand new location. That campground, the Lake Placid/Whiteface Mountain KOA, was “moved” 2.4 miles up the road last October and reopened this spring, albeit with only 31 RV sites. More, undoubtedly, will follow.

The vacated KOA campground, meanwhile, has the advantage of having already cleared many regulatory hurdles—although not all. As reported last week in the Adirondack Explorer, both the Adirondack Park Agency and the state Department of Environmental Conservation have been soliciting public comment, with the DEC evaluating the project for a wastewater discharge permit. The APA, meanwhile, which oversees public and private development within Adirondack Park, is reviewing the proposal’s “25% expansion of an existing tourist accommodation”—one indication of glamping’s more robust environmental footprint.

Tellingly, KOA declined to respond to inquiries about its plans from the Adirondack Explorer beyond an anodyne assurance that the company “will carry on its mission of connecting people to the outdoors and each other.” The stonewall was blatant enough to elicit a surprised comment from Wilmington Supervisor Roy Holzer, who supports the Terramor venture and thinks KOA “should be keeping the public informed and building excitement for their project,” the Explorer reported. Instead, the Explorer article appears to be the only news report about the project in several months, and even it put in a tardy appearance, publishing on April 20—the deadline for public comments to the DEC. The Adirondack Park Agency, meanwhile, is accepting comments until May 4.

While the communications black-out in New York has succeeded thus far in allowing KOA to fly under the radar, the weather is a bit stormier—literally as well as figuratively—at its other announced Terramor venture, at Midpines in Mariposa County, California. Although it filed a preapplication proposal more than 16 months ago to build two major campgrounds straddling the road that access the south entrance to Yosemite National Park, including a 400-site KOA resort and an 80-90 site Terramor, KOA has yet to follow up with an actual application. Nor has it followed through with promises of additional public meetings after a “coffee and conversation” meeting with local residents last June that left many “uncertain and unhappy,” according to a local newspaper.

But nature abhors a vacuum. While one extreme weather event after another battered the western Sierra foothills—forest fires, record-breaking snowfalls and now widespread flooding, prompting the National Park Service to close Yosemite’s campgrounds starting tomorrow—a similarly extreme human storm has been building among local residents, enhanced in no small degree by KOA’s aloof approach. A grassroots group calling itself Mariposans Against KOA and Terramor has been gifted with the lawn signs used by KOA’s opponents in the Catskills, which it has been erecting locally, and has created a Facebook page where the current hot topic is the amount of water KOA would be sucking out of the ground—five times as much as is used by Midpines residents.

Given the extraordinarily challenging environmental considerations KOA has had to take into account this past year, it’s not inconceivable that it might be having second thoughts about its Mariposa County plans. Then again, this is not a company that backs down gracefully. Three years after opening its Bar Harbor Terramor to mixed reviews, and with earlier projections of having three such glamping resorts up and running by 2025 increasingly in doubt, KOA seems to have decided that the less said the better. Unfortunately, that also means that a lot of people may feel ambushed when the other shoe drops.

Most recent posts

Out of the frying pan, into the fire?

There is great jubilation in New York’s Catskills region this week, on the news that KOA is walking away from a proposed 75-site glamping resort that faced growing local opposition. (See past posts here and here.) News of the unexpected about-face came in a terse three-sentence letter, dated Feb. 8, announcing that the company “has formally withdrawn its special use permit, site plan and subdivision applications.”

Signed by Jenny McCullough, senior director of marketing and operations for Terramor Outdoor Resort, the letter was received by the Saugerties planning board two weeks ahead of a meeting at which KOA was expected to respond to numerous concerns raised by area residents. “After careful evaluation, it was determined that the project did not meet criteria across several benchmarks to warrant moving forward,” McCullough wrote, without further elaboration. In response to subsequent emailed queries, McCullough gave assurances that the company has “no intention to resubmit at a later date,” but also confirmed that KOA still owns the 77-acre site and is “discussing our options internally” on how to proceed.

Planning board chairman Howard Post, meanwhile, responded to local residents by saying the board has “no idea” what KOA will do next. “Nothing to stop them from resubmitting,” he wrote. “They might sell . . . they gave no indication nor do they have to.”

But as it turns out, KOA/Terramor has bigger fish to fry—or bigger headaches with which to contend. Because even as it was plunging into the Catskills morass, it simultaneously was looking to develop a far larger and more ambitious project in the foothills of the High Sierra, just outside Yosemite National Park. Much more ambitious. According to the preapplication proposal it filed in December of 2021 with the Mariposa County Planning Board, KOA wants to build two resorts on a 993-acre property that straddles State Highway 140, a major access route for the park. The broad strokes include:

  • A KOA Resort would be located on 90 acres south of the highway, to include 400 full hook-up RV sites and 25 to 50 tent sites with water connections. A 10,000-square-feet building would house a check-in desk, restaurant, store, laundry, a meeting space and employee office space. Also located on the grounds would be a swimming pool and bathhouse, two playgrounds and “select employee housing.”
  • A Terramor Outdoor Resort would be built on 80 acres on the north side of the highway and would include 80 to 90 “conditioned glamping units,” also described as “tents [that] will incorporate standard amenities of a luxury hotel room including a full bathroom, electrical supply and climate control.” An 8,000-square-foot lodge would include a restaurant, meeting space and indoor pool, while other amenities would include a 2,000-square-foot open-air pavilion and a 1,500-square-foot wellness/spa center. As with its neighboring resort, the Terramor property also would include “select employee housing.”
  • The two resorts would have a combined 100 employees and would expect to have 800 guests a day at the KOA resort and 200 a day at Terramor. The two facilities would have a total of 525 on-site parking spaces and would consume up to 51,000 gallons of water a day.

A preapplication is by definition conceptual and short on details, giving county planners an opportunity to list the specific information they will require in a formal proposal. So perhaps it’s not surprising that when KOA got around to its first public presentation, a “coffee and conversation” meeting in mid-June last summer, the discussion was still vague enough that it “left many members of the community uncertain and unhappy,” according to a report in the Mariposa Gazette. But not to worry: local residents were assured more details would be forthcoming in a meeting later that summer or early fall.

Nature had other ideas. Mere weeks after the kaffeeklatsch, the Oak Fire sprang up literally next door to the Terramor/KOA site and consumed more than 19,000 acres before being wrestled into submission in mid August. (The Oak Fire, it should be noted, occurred less than a mile west of where the even more substantial Ferguson Fire ravaged 97,000 acres in 2018.) Somehow, the fall public presentations never occurred; what did occur was a request from the Mariposa County fire department at a board of supervisors meeting for the county to bite the bullet and start supplementing the virtually all-volunteer fire fighting force with paid staff. Four of the county’s 13 fire stations are unstaffed because of declining volunteer levels, while the only paid fire fighters have been the chief and his deputy.

More recently, nature let loose with a second volley, this time with the torrential rains that battered California for much of January. The resulting floods and erosion were even more pronounced in areas with recent burn scars, such as those left by the Oak Fire, with roads washed away and local residents left stranded for days on end. As icing on the cake, it turns out that Mariposa is the only county in California that does not participate in FEMA’s federal flood insurance program.

KOA has made no public pronouncements about any of these developments, or how they may affect its plans. Nonetheless, it has yet to file a formal proposal with Mariposa County, casting further doubt on its announced plans to have three Terramor resorts up and running by 2025; the only existing Terramor is in Bar Harbor, Maine. Meanwhile, Mariposa residents opposed to KOA’s plans have turned to their Catskills counterparts for organizing pointers—and apparently may expect a shipment of no-longer-needed anti-Terramor lawn signs and posters that are being collected in Saugerties and Woodstock on their behalf.

There is one other ironic footnote to all this: as previously noted, KOA already had a campground in the Saugerties/Woodstock area that it could have repurposed as a Terramor with much less hassle, but which was sold to its glamping rival, Autocamp. KOA also had a franchised campground in Mariposa County, just a mile up the road from its proposed new development—but that too was sold, also to Autocamp. The 98-site Yosemite Airstream glampground had its ribbon-cutting in 2019.

Most recent posts