It’s only natural that Bobby Cornwell, president of the Florida RV Park & Campground Association, would preen about a legislative “major victory” in which he played—at best!— only a minor role; he is, after all, a politician of sorts, dependent on the association’s dues-paying members for his livelihood. Stretching the truth—and then some!—comes with the territory. But you can’t say as much for Woodall’s Campground Magazine, which at least pretends to be a journalistic product. Would that it were so, in which case its Florida readers would have some insights into what’s going on in their backyards.
I gave passing mention to Woodall’s continuing slide toward industry sycophancy a couple of posts ago, reporting on its superficial coverage of a Citrus County glampground, so there’s not much purpose in rehashing that issue here. But that was only one of the two “victories” recounted in a page 6 Woodall’s article under the assertive headline, “Florida Association Scores Major Property Tax, Development Wins,” in which Cornwell boasted of the association’s “necessary show of force” to prevent officials in two counties from “making a big mistake.”
That second averted mistake supposedly occurred in Sumter County on Aug. 22, when the county’s board of commissioners considered a proposal to increase its fire assessment fee from $124 to $323.64 a year for residents and businesses. The increase was needed, proponents said, to avoid $26 million in budget cuts for fire and ambulance services in the county as well as in The Villages, possibly the country’s largest retirement community, with which it shares emergency responders. Retirees don’t look on tax increases favorably, and they have a lot of time on their hands, so there’s no surprise that the Aug. 22 hearing was packed, passionate and ran for five hours. Cornwell’s contribution was a mere sliver of the whole. The commissioners, dutifully cowed, ended up defeating the entire proposal by a wobbly vote of 3-2.
Which, of course, didn’t resolve the underlying problem, so the cutting has already started. Sumter County’s fire chief says he’ll be laying off 30 firefighters and deep-sixing plans that had been made to hire an additional 27 employees next year. The chief of the public safety department at The Villages said he will lose 57 new positions that had been planned for next year, and has already lost three of the seven staffed ambulances the community had been leasing from American Medical Response. County officials said they’re trying to “come up with solutions.”
None of this was mentioned in Woodall’s coverage, nor in Cornwell’s public pronouncements, which would have us believe that the Florida RV Park & Campground Association had successfully repelled an attack specifically targeting RV campgrounds and not tens of thousands of homes and other businesses. Defeating the fire assessment fee “was a great night for Florida’s RV park industry,” Cornwell crowed, quite likely forestalling “similar proposals in other counties.” Yadda-yadda.
The point that Cornwell failed to explore—aside from, you know, that whole context thing—is the curiously specific number assigned to the proposed new fee: $323.64 a year according to press reports, $323.40 per RV site, according to Cornwell. Without getting into the complexities of how either number was derived, suffice to say that numerous variables were factored into the proposed fee, including ten years of actual responder histories, and the result was to be charged per single dwelling unit—which is to say, under the proposed fee schedule each site at an RV park was to be treated as a separate residence. And that, all by itself, deserves attention for at least two reasons.
Number one, it suggests that public officials are starting to view RV parks less as providing transient lodging akin to hotels and more as wheeled subdivisions, which means campground owners are seen as having a multiplicity of taxable units rather than owning just one large business entity. And number two, this shifting perspective means that RV parks are becoming recognized as an agglomeration of discrete cost centers, with separate and distinct demands on fire and rescue services, demand for road and school access and claims on other county amenities, such as libraries, community centers and landfills. Those costs have to be underwritten, and how to do that equitably without charging for each site?
Campground owners, of course, are aghast at such an idea. As Cornwell pointed out, a 200-site RV campground in Sumter County, had the proposed fee schedule passed, would have been on the hook for an annual (and additional) tax bill of $64,680. Others, pointing to a different aspect of the defeated fee that included square-foot calculations, said they would have been been hit with six-figure assessments—indeed, one unnamed campground owner with two properties told a local reporter her annual assessment would rise to $490,000.
Alarmist, perhaps—but also willfully determined not to recognize the perceptual shift that’s underway, much less how to respond in a meaningful way. It should be evident that much of this change is of the industry’s own doing, as campgrounds increasingly rent long-term sites to people who are not passing through but are, in fact, living in their RVs. And as recent events in Georgia have demonstrated, rolling back the tide in one state, however temporarily, doesn’t mean it won’t rise elsewhere—and, eventually, become an industry standard.
Next post: Monroe County, Georgia, approves a $250-a-year surcharge per RV site in its campgrounds for basic services, as it also clamps down on residents living in RVs on private land—potentially forcing some to move to those pricier RV parks, further enhancing their long-term housing attributes.
Renting Dirt 