YouTube video by Donna Bordeaux (Donna Genie) arguing that a proposed luxury RV resort in Lake Wylie, South Carolina would benefit the local community. The speaker rebuts common myths—campgrounds lower property values, worsen traffic, create air pollution from campfires—and presents economic benefits including visitor spending, nightly rates, and job/build cost estimates to support development.
The news of someone building a new campground or RV resort in your community may bring about a lot of controversy if you're like most towns. I live in Lake Wylie, South Carolina, and we've recently had news of a new RV developer wanting to come build a luxury RV resort in our town, and many people are very concerned. My name is Donna Bordeaux, and I work with campground owners and small businesses all across the United States to help them find their way. Today we'll be discussing why I think you should be excited about the prospect of a campground coming to your community and the effects that it has has on your local economy. Let's first take a look at a few myths. Why are people upset that a campground might be coming? All right, myth number one, campgrounds. Oh, it'll be like a mobile home park or a trailer park coming into our area, and it will cause our property values to decline. Campgrounds are nothing like trailer parks or mobile home parks. Those are places where people inform a place to live. A campground is more transient than that. Now, often people take transient to be a bad word. It's not transient, meaning visitors coming to see you and experience your area, your town, and what it has to offer. That's a great thing. Tourism is a big help to your local economy, and it should be supportive. People who are coming to camp in your area are probably spending a minimum 20, 30, $40,000 for a camper to bring in on upwards to millions of dollars for class A motor coaches who may be coming into your park in your area as well. So these are not the people that are portrayed to be like transient, living out of the back of a van kind of people. These are not homeless people. These are people who want to experience the outdoors and spend time relaxing with family and friends. And I think that's a good thing for your community, not a bad thing. The next thing I'll mention is they talk about, oh, the traffic. Everybody's worried about traffic. Let's take a dive into this one. Okay. If you are in a town where traffic is a big issue, you're typically talking about rush hour times of the day. First thing in the morning, evening traffic. Campers avoid that traffic like crazy. If they are leaving the park, they're generally leaving between 10 and 11 o' clock in the morning. Generally, 11 o' clock is like a very common checkout time. And secondly, they're generally arriving between about one and three o'. Clock. Maybe four is a stretch. But the general rule in the rving industry is to do no more than 330 miles or get off the road by 3:30 in the afternoon. They're not typically driving in in the dark. Nobody wants to do that in a big rig or a big piece of equipment where you have to navigate things in the dark. Also, campers don't usually contribute much to the traffic flow because they're not just coming out for one day at a time. Generally, camping stays are between 3 and 10 days on average. So if anything, if we consider the alternative of having houses or apartments on that same land where they're talking about developing a campground, you can have people moving in and out all day long every day versus every week. That's a pretty good trade off in my opinion. Next, let's talk about why campers come to your area. They may be visiting family. They may be experiencing your area, doing some tourism type things. They may work in your area or be looking to move there and checking out your area. I think we'd all agree those are all pretty good things. Good reasons for people to come. Based on the 2023 report by KOA in their north American Camping and Hospitality Report, they show that campers spend an average of $332 per day in your local economy. Come on, that's pretty good. They're visiting your restaurants, they're visiting your stores, your fishing, camping gears, all of those kinds of things. And I'd say that's a pretty conservative number. Also, remember that they are staying at this campground. They're paying to stay there. This is not a five bucks a night or pull in and park your hunk of junk. They're probably paying between $75 and $150 a night to stay in that campground. This is good for your economy. All right, and last, the other big myth we want to break, and this one I heard locally. Oh, my gosh, the smell of all those campfires is going to pollute our air. All right, folks, I'm going to bring you into the reality camping looks today. Now, camping, where we're talking backwoods camping, we haul in, hike a tent and gather some tree limbs and some wood and make a fire for the night and go to bed. That is backwoods camping, and that is not what a campground or an RV resort generally offers these days. Campgrounds and RV resorts are more glamping now and luxury than anything else. So first, you don't find a lot of campfires. There are many people, like, including me, who travel with a portable gas fire pit. It gives the ambiance of a fire. But I don't have to stay up late and wait for that fire to go out, I don't have to smell like a campfire all day. So there's a lot of alternatives to wood fires and you typically don't find that many campfires in a campground at any given point. So the idea of having pollution to nearing neighbors is completely false. That's not going to happen. And last, let's talk about the job growth in your community. Not only do you have to have people there to run a campground, but let's talk about the building things. A small campground, less than 50 sites can cost about a million dollars all in for that owner. They're struggling and pouring their life savings into these in most cases. To build a successful campground, even if you have a big developer come In a luxury RV resort with 150, 200 sites, it's probably going to cost upwards of anywhere from 20 to 50 million dollars to put in, depending on the amenities that they're doing in that park. So I really think you ought to reconsider and we should probably be welcoming these people with open arms. I know I support the campground developer who's coming to our area. The plans are fabulous. It would be a great amenity for our whole community. And heck, I'd love the prospect of going five minutes down the road with my rig and going to camp for the weekend and just getting a quick break in here and there. So re evaluate why you think a campground coming to your area is a bad idea. And I think you'll follow me here. It's really probably a great idea that you should help and support. Thank you.
