Proposed campground draws mix of reactions

A proposal for a campground located at Mill and Johnson roads is still in the staff reviewing stage at the county planning and development department and is not expected to reach the hearing examiner’s office until October, according to county planner Maddie Schacht.

If approved, the project would be built in two stages with the first encompassing 65 camping, yurt and RV sites. There would be five buildings each no more than one story including a caretaker residence, general store and washroom and shower facilities. The second stage would bring the total number of sites to 164, according to the documents filed with the county.

According to the developer, Lorne Nielson, the aim is to keep the property as undeveloped as possible. Approximately 75 percent of the property will be kept in natural vegetation with as few trees cut as possible, he told attendees at a July 25 Point Roberts Community Advisory Committee (PRCAC) meeting.

Nielson outlined some of the ways that the project would further the goals of the Point Roberts sub-area plan. For one thing, he said, it would encourage the retention of trees and plant cover. “Our goal is to replant trees wherever possible,” he said. Another goal of the plan is to increase transient or tourist housing “and this project does that,” he pointed out.

The development will be clustered in the southeastern corner of the property taking up about one-third of the property. While the property is currently undeveloped, it was originally planned to be a continuation of the Dogwood Park development to the west and contains road cuts, fire hydrants and water mains that were installed in the 1970s. It currently has a Point Roberts Transitional Zone designation.

Many of the speakers at the PRCAC meeting were neighbors who were against the proposal citing concerns about noise, traffic, environmental degradation and project feasibility.

One speaker, Tom Walters, relatively new to the Point and a neighbor to the project said, “One of our biggest concerns really is with the scale of this development. We’re talking about hundreds of people, potentially, in a neighborhood where they have no particular stake in the care for that neighborhood. We’re a little concerned about this being a transient population, but at the same time, we also wonder if it’s maybe not going to be transient enough with the 180-day stay. The question occurs to us, is this going to become a kind of shanty town for seasonal workers?”

A Shady Glen resident expressed his opposition to the project, saying, “Some of us come here and we like things just the way they are. We don’t need any economic development. We’re quite happy with the way things are. I don’t need this economic development or all the noise and everything else that goes with it. So that’s my two cents.”

“My family goes back here for five generations,” said Ken Calder. “My great, great grandfather homesteaded here in the 1890s. In the early ’90s, I actually lived at and worked at one of the trailer parks and when the people who owned it at the time, Gary and Kim Pringle, decided to move on, it was bought by a family and closed up. Same things happened to two other campgrounds in Point Roberts, Bells Grove, down on Edwards Drive there was a trailer park right on the beach, and another one that used to be down by the Blackfish development. North of Lighthouse Park was another campground that had closed down over the years. I see the benefits of a campground here. There’s always a park ranger of the campground, and when you come into a campground, you sign an agreement stating that you’ll follow the rules. I’m sure that there will be stronger noise ordinances in this campground than what we put up with all our weekend people coming down on the Canadian long weekends. I’m all for it,” he said.

Responding to some of the points raised by the speakers, Nielson said, “The challenge that we’re going to have with this campground is creating something that people will want to come to. It’s not on the beach but there is a trend. First of all, we have 2 million people that live within an hour of Point Roberts, and a whole bunch of these people have campers. They struggle to find places to camp and have to book online a year in advance to get a spot. We want to create an environment that people will want to come to and so the focus of this campground is nature. It’s going to be amongst the trees. The campground is for people to come experience nature. There is a movement out there called forest washing, getting back to nature.”

He also addressed the issue of smoke, fire danger and the length of stays saying that as the fire marshal had already discouraged open fires on the property, they would be using propane fire pits which produce no sparks or smoke. He added they could look at reducing the 180-day stay limit as they had only included it to prevent long term stays.

Nielson also promised that issues of noise would be handled promptly. “This facility will be managed professionally. We will have a manager there so if there is noise or problems that will be dealt with immediately, because the manager lives on site,” he promised.

“I don’t know what it will mean in 50 or 100 years but I think keeping one 50-acre parcel as a mostly treed campground will mean a lot more to the community than a bunch of empty building lots,” Nielson said, a reference to an earlier comment he had made regarding housing developments that had failed to build out.