Tag: RV parks as subdivisions

RV park is really a cheap trailer court

RVtravel.com had a curious little story this past week headlined “Idaho: A little RV park draws plenty of opposition.” I call it “curious” because the article glided right over the central issue to fixate on the “tempest in a teapot” nature of a two-year battle waged by a developer to build a tiny 20-site RV park on 4.17 very rural acres. As the article points out, this is an extremely modest proposal that readily meets or exceeds all relevant county standards—so how come there’s a groundswell of local opposition, including a court challenge, in a state better known for its libertarian, live-and-let live inclination?

Maybe it has something to do with the ongoing trend of cheap housing developments masquerading as RV parks.

Not that there’s any mystery about what’s going on. When Idaho Land LLC filed its application with Bonner County for a conditional use permit, it was completely aboveboard about its intentions. “Our mission is to provide affordable housing for members of our community,” the application states. “With Idaho being the fastest growing state by population, and Bonner County growth projected to be 2.25% annually, the park will provide transitional housing for those migrating to north Idaho and provide a low income housing option for current residents who are combating rising housing prices in the area.”

As the application also notes, “The park is in alignment with the counties [sic] goal of providing affordable housing options in an area with adequate public and private services provided.” And, again: “The park will provide alternate low income housing options for residents in accordance with the goal of providing adequate shelter regardless of age, income or physical ability.”

There are at least a couple of problems with these frank assertions, starting with the obvious question of why anyone would call this an “RV park.” This is as bare-bones a “park” as one can imagine, the site plan showing little more than an oval gravel road with 20 full hookup back-in sites, a “laundry facility” and a dumpster. No bathhouse, no registration office, no campstore or playground or any other kind of structure or amenity, for that matter, and apparently no staff . This is basically a trailer park for RVs.

But Bonner County’s zoning regulations, while limiting occupancy of RVs on residentially zoned land to 120 days, specifically exclude RV parks from that limitation. Indeed, the county’s extensive rules about RV parks are inexplicably silent on that one question, even as the rules acknowledge that RVs are “primarily designed as temporary living quarters.” Meanwhile, the county’s zoning regs allow only one RV per residential lot unless a conditional use permit is granted. Opposition to the Idaho Land proposal is based in part on the contention that because it’s looking to provide a residential facility rather than a recreational one, the one-RV-per-lot limitation should be applied.

Not so, argue Idaho Land and its representative, Stephen Doty. “I’m not applying for dwelling units,” Doty was quoted as saying by Rvtravel, ignoring the application’s clear assertions about housing. “I’m applying for an RV park permit to operate an RV park.”

The idea that simply calling something an RV park makes it so, regardless of how the land will actually be used, is troubling enough. But the wider issue here—and one that should concern an industry that increasingly claims to be part of the “hospitality industry”—is the growing acceptance of RVs as residential options (as I’ve written before, here, here and here, among many, many other posts). As I’ve stressed before, and as industry manufacturers likewise feebly maintain, RVs are not built to residential standards. Think what you will about the cardboard walls and minimal insulation of house trailers, they at least have to conform to HUD standards that RV manufacturers can blithely ignore.

But trailer parks have acquired a disreputable reputation, which means no one is in a rush to build more of them, while RV parks still retain a feel-good image. Moreover, the campground industry clearly wants some of that action, too. Thanks to a real estate crunch that has made affordable housing increasingly scarce, demand for monthly RV sites has gone through the roof, convincing a growing number of RV parks to convert transient sites into long-term ones. And why not? Long-term sites mean predictable and steady income; with less turnover, they also allow for lower staffing levels and fewer amenities than are expected by a recreational customer base. The bare-bones Bonner County proposal is only the logical outcome of this trend taken to an extreme.

Yet as I wrote quite recently, this is a trend that will come back to bite the industry in the butt. The kicker is that the industry knows this—it just seems incapable of doing anything about the slow-moving train wreck it has created for itself. As Dyana Kelley, executive director of the California Outdoor Hospitality Association, recently acknowledged, “If we look like and act like low-income housing, then that is how we will be perceived and regulated.” Bonner County, in approving the Idaho Land application last week, simply pounded one more nail into that coffin.

Georgia: the future of RV park taxes?

Florida’s campground owners were jubilant recently over a failed effort in Sumter County to boost annual fire assessment fees. The fees, which pay for firefighters and emergency medical responders, had last been updated in 2006 and had become woefully inadequate in one of the state’s fastest growing areas. The failed proposal would have nearly tripled the existing rate, to $323.24 per household from the current rate of $124.

But here’s what really galled the RV park industry: the annual fee would have been levied against each individual RV site. Rather than one fee for an entire campground—the way a single fee would be levied against a hotel, whose assessment would be based on square footage rather than number of rooms—each site would have been treated like a separate structure. Have a campground with 200 sites? Be prepared to see your annual tax bill jump $65,000 a year.

No wonder they’re breathing easier in Florida—even though the question of how to pay for adequate fire protection and emergency medical services remains unresolved. But as a small county in nearby Georgia illustrates, the idea that RV sites rather than RV parks should be taxed for basic support services is still very much alive. And as more private campgrounds embrace long-term RVers and add park models, cabins and other quasi-residential facilities, the more local counties and municipalities will begin to view them as substantially like subdivisions, and therefore suitable for taxing like subdivisions.

Don’t see the parallel? Then consider this: what message does a campground convey when its gates become a regular school bus stop?

That was just one of the many considerations tossed around at a fascinating Oct. 17 meeting of the Monroe County board of commissioners, viewable on its Facebook page here (the relevant portion begins around the 57-minute mark). Unlike Sumter County in Florida, Monroe County is not big on RV parks—but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of RVs. Like a growing number of rural areas with more people than housing and less money than land, its 400 square miles are dotted with RVs, singly and in clumps of two or three, as alternative housing. Monroe County also is working hard to attract new businesses and industry, and all those proliferating RV homes could be seen as detracting from its charms. Something had to be done.

The first step Monroe County took was to adopt on Sept. 5 a Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), a 312-page document two years in the making that was presented as a much-needed effort to get a handle on the RV problem—a problem that commissioners said had grown markedly worse even as the UDO was being developed. No surprise, then, that the new rules prohibit permanent resident use of an RV outside of an RV park unless it is on agriculturally zoned land of at least three acres, is occupied by the property owner or a family member, and has full utility hook-ups. Moreover, more than one RV per property is prohibited except in RV parks, for which additional requirements were to be adopted in October.

The kicker? Each RV on private property will be assessed $1,000 a year in lieu of property taxes ($750 for senior citizens), starting Jan. 1, to offset the cost of county services.

Having thus all but guaranteed that the county’s RV parks will get a surge in demand next year, Monroe’s commissioners took up campground regulations at their Oct. 17 meeting—and discovered that regulating RV parks is quite a bit more complicated than regulating individual properties. Although the board readily agreed that such campgrounds should have a minimum of 10 RV sites, in order to generate enough income to provide minimal services—“otherwise, it’s just an RV in a field,” one commissioner observed—and that such campgrounds should have a minimum size of 25 acres, the question of how full-time RVers should pay for county services proved much thornier.

Permanent RV dwellers in a campground, board members ventured, should pay an annual fee just like RV dwellers on private property. But in a campground, who’s “permanent” and how is that determined? As Keith Morey, the owner of L&D RV Park—one of only three parks in Monroe that county officials held up as meeting the new standards—pointed out, one of his customers leaves an RV parked at the campground for three months each year, but uses it only on the weekends when Mercer University has a home baseball game. Should he be charged the same fee as someone who lives at the park 12 months a year?

And what, exactly, distinguishes a permanent stay from a transitory one? Is it 90 days? Thirty days? Fourteen? Whatever the cut-off, what happens if an RVer stays that length of time, then moves to another site at the same campground? Does that reset the clock? Moreover, who determines how many RVers are permanent and how many transitory when a campground census is changing all the time? Is a single annual snapshot adequate? Once a month? Weekly? And who decides? The campground owner, or an already overworked county code enforcement officer?

The deeper into these weeds the commissioners waded, the more it became evident that a site-by-site approach was impractical—“a logistical nightmare,” in one commissioner’s words— and that the only workable solution is to have a flat fee per site without regard for how long the site is occupied, or if it’s occupied at all. As a result, the originally proposed $1,000 fee—matching the amount charged to individual property RVs—dropped to $500, then to $250. And so it was approved, by a unanimous 5-0 vote.

Whether Monroe County’s new RV regs will accomplish their intended purpose remains to be seen, of course—it’s already obvious that at least some tweaks will be needed, either by granting variances or through outright code changes. The 19-site Red Oaks RV Park, for example, despite being cited as one of the three campgrounds meeting the new standards, is less than a quarter the size of the newly mandated minimum 25 acres. On the other hand, county officials said there are a dozen or more sketchy facilities that need “a lot” of upgrades to meet the new code—too many, in most cases, to be worthwhile—suggesting the county may be well on its way to shutting down the worst RV eyesores.

Of wider relevance, meanwhile, is the county’s willingness to tackle an issue that has bedeviled many larger or more sophisticated jurisdictions. In California, for example, the president of the state’s RV association recently lamented that the trend toward permanent “campers” has created “the appearance of residential affordable housing”—an appearance “that will bury us in the legislature in the very near future.”

“If it walks like a duck and floats like a duck, then it must be a duck,” she added.  “If we look like and act like low-income housing, then that is how we will be perceived and regulated.  As an industry, we must operate our parks as though they are 100% transient even though we may have long term guests, but how do we do that?”

Good question. The answer in Monroe County, just to mix up animal metaphors, is that the horse is already out of the barn.