FARMINGTON – A Franklin County Superior Court justice has ruled against a Zoning Board of Appeals decision that favored an out-of-state family who wants to build a summer camp for 400 children and 200 counselors on Round Pond because it never filed an application with the town.
In an order dated March 8, Justice Joseph Jabar vacated a May 2005 Rangeley Zoning Board of Appeals decision, effectively bringing the plan of Herman and Mary Glick of New York back to “square one,” Rangeley Town Manager Perry Ellsworth said Thursday.
Code Enforcement Officer Robert Griscom said Wednesday that New Yorkers Herman Glick and his mother, Mary Glick, who have said they plan to build a 400-child, 200-counselor summer camp on Round Pond, were informed last year that commercial summer camps are not on the list of allowed land uses in the town zoning ordinances, and that they probably would not be able to build a camp in Rangeley.
Griscom explained Wednesday that land uses not on the zoning ordinance list are considered prohibited unless landowners can prove their proposed usage is similar to one of the uses on the list. He said the Glicks claim a commercial summer camp is similar to a campground, which is allowed in Rangeley, and that therefore any application they submit should be accepted. They brought the question to Griscom, who told them he thought it was not similar enough to be approved, unless Rangeley voters decide to add “commercial summer camp” to the list in the zoning ordinances.
The Glicks then brought the question to the Zoning Board of Appeals, in an attempt to have Griscom’s opinion appealed. On May 12, 2005, the zoning board voted to reverse Griscom’s findings in favor of the Glicks.
Committed to protecting Round Pond from over-development, members of the Rangeley Crossroads Coalition took issue with the zoning board’s decision and appealed it to Superior Court, stating that, since the Glicks had never filed an application, the board’s decision was void.
Judge Jabar agreed with them. In his order, he wrote that since there was no application filed, the code enforcement officer’s opinion was advisory only.
For Crossroads Coalition member Cathryn Thorup, Jabar’s decision represented a “major victory” for people who oppose the camp, which she describes as “the size of 50 football fields on this tiny pond,” with a fully operating population of almost “half again the population of Rangeley.”
“The reason the coalition had filed the appeal was because we felt the ZBA was in error” and worried that, with “something on the record saying that the camp was similar to something else,” it “would have opened that back door,” and made it easier for the Glicks to win approval, she said.
Now the Glicks are going to have to go “through the front door and file an application with the Planning Board,” Thorup said.
The proposed camp has seen opposition from more than just the Crossroads Coalition, Thorup added. During a September special town meeting, nearly 150 Rangeley taxpayers voted unanimously against amending the town zoning ordinances to allow commercial summer camps in town, she said.
But Ellsworth said the vote cuts both ways. Without an amendment allowing, and then regulating, commercial camps, the town could be in trouble if the Glicks’ as-yet-to-be submitted application is accepted as a “similar use.”
“It failed unanimously,” Ellsworth said. “But what ordinances are for is to limit what happens to these things.”
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