Owners of a local campground say they plan to expand with dozens more campsites after Worcester County authorities cleared the way with an agricultural rezoning of the property.
The Ewell family successfully petitioned the Worcester County Board of Commissioners to rezone 33 acres of Island Resort Campground, located off Croppers Island Road in Newark, going from an A-1 to an A-2 zoning designation.
Once the commissioners finalize the zoning update, which is scheduled for the board’s Nov. 19 meeting, the Ewells plan to add 53 campsites to the campground’s existing 164 campsites. Their original proposal was for 62 sites.
The purpose of the rezoning was to return the existing campground to a legal conforming use. Rental campgrounds like theirs had been allowed in the A-1 Agricultural zoning area. The property had been A-1 when it opened nearly 20 years ago.
However, the county’s 2009 comprehensive rezoning put their acreage into the A-2 zoning, where rental campsites are not permitted. It means the Ewell’s property has been nonconforming, and expansion of campsites wasn’t allowed for nonconforming properties, according to their attorney Mark Cropper.
“You can’t expand a nonconforming use by more than 50 per cent,” Cropper said in an interview. “It became very difficult to figure out, how to define the scope of the original campground, for the purpose of calculating whether this expansion did or did not exceed that 50 per cent.
He said the way to solve that problem was to turn the campground into a legal conforming use, meaning that 50 percent rule no longer applied.
Cropper also said a traffic study shows that increasing the campground by 53 sites would have a negligible impact on vehicular traffic along Croppers Island Road.
It’s not the Ewell’s first time wrangling with land use regulations in their quest to expand the number of campsites at the campground. Cropper said first, about 18 months ago, he had to ask the commissioners to change his client’s acreage from a Resource Conservation Area to a Limited Development Area, which did go through.
The campground expansion is not without some unneighborly opposition.
In a Sept. 4 e-mail to county officials, Raye Simpson of Croppers Island Road asked elected officials to scrutinize Ewell’s request, arguing that that adding more campsites would add stress to well water and local sewerage, among other issues.
“The campers have large motor homes and camper rigs. No tents. There is a lot of traffic on our road from spring to fall and the campers can’t wait to get here, thus speeding over 30 mph up to 50-plus mph is an issue,” Simpson wrote.
Next, the Ewells will be asking Worcester County officials for another change to the property – this time, to allow butchering of cattle.
Owner Robert Ewell has raised his own cattle for decades on the property and wants to be able to slaughter his livestock on-site instead of transporting the cattle out-of-state for butchering, according to Cropper.
Cropper said he’s filed an application for a zoning code amendment so that Ewell can host his own slaughterhouse on his property. The request was scheduled for a Nov. 14 meeting of the county’s Board of Zoning Appeals, which would have to grant the special exception.
