(April 6, 2017) A Worcester County Board of Zoning Appeals hearing related to the Bay Club was postponed this week at the request of Berlin Mayor Gee Williams.
That’s according to attorney Hugh Cropper, who represents Bay Club ownership group the Carl M. Freeman Companies.
The hearing was scheduled for April 13, when the developer would have asked for a special zoning exception to transform the 437-acre property on Libertytown Road in Berlin into a 434-unit campground. The property is currently zoned A-2.
A similar hearing, which had been set for Dec. 8, was postponed for similar reasons, and Cropper presented some details of the project during a Town Council meeting on Dec. 12.
Now, he will apparently go before the council again before rescheduling with the county.
“Carl Freeman wants to be a friend and a good neighbor to the Town of Berlin, so we’ll make further presentations and present further details about our project to the town before [the hearing] is reset,” Cropper said on Monday. “I don’t know if that will be informally or formally.”
Cropper said he did not expect that to occur during the next regularly scheduled town council meeting, next Monday.
He defended the proposed redevelopment as an environmentally conscious, economic driver for the town
“We think [a campground] would be very environmentally friendly,” Cropper said. “In other areas where they have 400-unit campgrounds, they fit them on 25 or 30 acres. There’s going to be contiguous tracks of hundreds of acres of open space. I doubt you’ll ever see it from the road.”
Transitioning from a 36-hole golf course to a campground, Cropper said, would likely produce the same amount of traffic. He said 25 percent of the campsites would be cabins and a small percentage would be primitive sites, with just enough space to set up a tent.
“It will not be all RV hookups,” he said. “You’ll probably have a little less than 300 RV campsites. At other campgrounds that I’ve represented you find many of those rent by the season, so people go there in the spring, set up their RV and leave it, and they come and go in their car.”
Cropper did not believe downtown Berlin would suddenly become flooded by RV traffic, as some critics have claimed.
“The cars would be what is driving around downtown, and I would think Berlin wants those because they will be people eating dinner and shopping — all the things that we want,” Cropper said.
With each reservation, he said, campers would be instructed to travel down Powellville Road and Libertytown Road.
“Between the fact that we’ll probably be 300 RV sites, between the fact that many of those will stay for the entire season, and between the fact that we’re going to bring them all in from the west, I just do not believe that you’re going to have a train of RVs clogging up downtown Berlin,” Cropper said. “From a traffic perspective, I think you’re going to see less traffic during the week coming out of that place because Carl Freeman wants to have nice amenities and keep people on the property.”
Under county law, those amenities could only be used by campers, Cropper said.
The county also requires campgrounds to be closed for five months out of each year, which Cropper said would make for an excellent customer for Town of Berlin water and sewer – if the property were to be annexed.
“And it will raise lots of taxes and will have virtually no impact on the public services,” Cropper said. “I don’t know why Berlin wouldn’t want them – these are fairly affluent folks. Some of their campers are nicer than my house.”
Williams, on Monday, said no hearing with the town was imminent.
“We just want to make sure they know what all of our concerns are,” he said. “We’ve stated them in a very general way, but we’d like to be more specific. That timeline is probably more in their court than ours.
“I believe that we’ll get a full and fair listen from these folks about what the town’s concerns are, and then see where we go from there,” Williams continued. “We want to be very upfront in sharing our concerns with them – how do you estimate how long that will take? I don’t think we’re talking months and years.
“I think it will be an evolutionary process – not a revolutionary one,” Williams said. “We certainly don’t want to drag anything out for anybody, but we don’t want any artificial deadlines either.”
That’s according to attorney Hugh Cropper, who represents Bay Club ownership group the Carl M. Freeman Companies.
The hearing was scheduled for April 13, when the developer would have asked for a special zoning exception to transform the 437-acre property on Libertytown Road in Berlin into a 434-unit campground. The property is currently zoned A-2.
A similar hearing, which had been set for Dec. 8, was postponed for similar reasons, and Cropper presented some details of the project during a Town Council meeting on Dec. 12.
Now, he will apparently go before the council again before rescheduling with the county.
“Carl Freeman wants to be a friend and a good neighbor to the Town of Berlin, so we’ll make further presentations and present further details about our project to the town before [the hearing] is reset,” Cropper said on Monday. “I don’t know if that will be informally or formally.”
Cropper said he did not expect that to occur during the next regularly scheduled town council meeting, next Monday.
He defended the proposed redevelopment as an environmentally conscious, economic driver for the town
“We think [a campground] would be very environmentally friendly,” Cropper said. “In other areas where they have 400-unit campgrounds, they fit them on 25 or 30 acres. There’s going to be contiguous tracks of hundreds of acres of open space. I doubt you’ll ever see it from the road.”
Transitioning from a 36-hole golf course to a campground, Cropper said, would likely produce the same amount of traffic. He said 25 percent of the campsites would be cabins and a small percentage would be primitive sites, with just enough space to set up a tent.
“It will not be all RV hookups,” he said. “You’ll probably have a little less than 300 RV campsites. At other campgrounds that I’ve represented you find many of those rent by the season, so people go there in the spring, set up their RV and leave it, and they come and go in their car.”
Cropper did not believe downtown Berlin would suddenly become flooded by RV traffic, as some critics have claimed.
“The cars would be what is driving around downtown, and I would think Berlin wants those because they will be people eating dinner and shopping — all the things that we want,” Cropper said.
With each reservation, he said, campers would be instructed to travel down Powellville Road and Libertytown Road.
“Between the fact that we’ll probably be 300 RV sites, between the fact that many of those will stay for the entire season, and between the fact that we’re going to bring them all in from the west, I just do not believe that you’re going to have a train of RVs clogging up downtown Berlin,” Cropper said. “From a traffic perspective, I think you’re going to see less traffic during the week coming out of that place because Carl Freeman wants to have nice amenities and keep people on the property.”
Under county law, those amenities could only be used by campers, Cropper said.
The county also requires campgrounds to be closed for five months out of each year, which Cropper said would make for an excellent customer for Town of Berlin water and sewer – if the property were to be annexed.
“And it will raise lots of taxes and will have virtually no impact on the public services,” Cropper said. “I don’t know why Berlin wouldn’t want them – these are fairly affluent folks. Some of their campers are nicer than my house.”
Williams, on Monday, said no hearing with the town was imminent.
“We just want to make sure they know what all of our concerns are,” he said. “We’ve stated them in a very general way, but we’d like to be more specific. That timeline is probably more in their court than ours.
“I believe that we’ll get a full and fair listen from these folks about what the town’s concerns are, and then see where we go from there,” Williams continued. “We want to be very upfront in sharing our concerns with them – how do you estimate how long that will take? I don’t think we’re talking months and years.
“I think it will be an evolutionary process – not a revolutionary one,” Williams said. “We certainly don’t want to drag anything out for anybody, but we don’t want any artificial deadlines either.”