BREAKING NEWS: Campground, Tremont citizens reach deal to settle island's nastiest zoning fight
TREMONT, Oct. 9, 2022 - All sides in the most divisive zoning battle in island history over a proposed luxury campground have reached an out-of-court settlement, according to a public notice in the Islander newspaper this week.
What started in January 2021 as a campground with 154 camping sites, including 72 RVs, will be pared down to what is allowed in the current Land-Use Ordinance, according people familiar with the agreement. The QSJ estimates that to be about 45 units.
The select board is scheduled to approve the agreement at its Oct. 17 meeting, the notice stated.
As part of the agreement, Citizens for Concerned Tremont will withdraw its appeal which resulted from the Planning Board’s approval of the campground being overturned by the town’s appeal board in April. Acadia Wilderness Lodge will withdraw its lawsuit against the town which was filed shortly after the appeals board’s decision.
AWL will then be free to build 45 glamping yurts at the site on Tremont Road in West Tremont.
Earlier this year, AWL was forced to cut back the number of units in its smaller campground abutting the bigger one from 11 to eight.
The two campgrounds were at the heart of the issue for the appeals board which ruled unanimously that the smaller campground granted a permit in 2019 was essentially the same project as the larger one and that they should have been a single application considered holistically instead of in fragments.
James and Kenya Hopkins, Florida residents who own the campgrounds, stirred the biggest citizens protest in town history when when they disclosed in January 2021 plans for a 154-unit campground in rural West Tremont, including 72 RVs, in a “residential/business zone” which only allowed “light commercial” businesses.
After a summer of neighborhood meetings, the Hopkins returned with a proposal for a 55-yurt “glamping” site. But appeals board members noted that the original application was for a campground, not a luxury destination with fancy “yurts.”
The citizens group was then formed to battle the proposal. It successfully petitioned for a six-month moratorium on campground development which voters approved 428-215 on Nov. 2, 2021. But on the previous night, planning board chair Mark Good oversaw a six-hour meeting and approved the permit for AWL minutes before midnight on Nov. 1.
High-pitched acrimony and ad hominum attacks by lawyers representing the campground interests have characterized much of the discourse. At one meeting, the AWL lawyer accused appeals board member Michael Hays of indulging in “conspiracy theories” when Hays posited that the campgrounds were a single entity.
Town Counsel James Collier at a select board meeting in March called a citizens proposal for land-use ordinance changes “stupid.” He, the select board and planning board sided with the developers during most of the fractious history of the project.