Point Cross RV Campground Project Met with Mixed Reactions

An RV campground project in Point Cross is receiving mixed reactions from the community. While some see it as an opportunity for economic development, neighbours around the site think it isn’t the right place for the project. 

The size of the development along Cabot Trail road, where owners plan to accommodate 118 RV and 30 tent sites across 9 acres, has some residents worried. “It’s a loss of privacy,” next door neighbour John Fabrizio said. “Our grandchildren would go out and run around the yard and head down towards the beach on the property that we have. I don’t feel that’s something I would feel comfortable doing now.”

Owners of the plot Scott Macpherson and Jason Harder said the project would benefit the whole community. “We want to bring business to Chéticamp, businesses around here so there are some secondary benefits to this,” Harder said. “It’s not just us. We want to be successful so we can give to the community so we can be a very intricate part of the community and be involved here.”

Some community members have expressed support for the proposed RV campground. Lucille Timmons, who owns an accommodations business across the street from the project, said in a statement, “Our community is always looking for ways to attract new business and opportunities for our people to come back home to make a good living. The owner of this campground is a young person who had worked away and found an opportunity to come back home to make his living while owning his own business. I think we should be supportive of that.”

While neighbours around the site said they support tourism, they think there are better places to build a campground. “We don’t feel as property owners that we’re just losing a view or a scenery,” next door neighbour Bill O’Neill said. “It’s trucks coming and going, cars coming and going. No curfew. How long this can go on? Campfires, you have your windows open in the summertime. You get a Southwind. The wind blows through our house, it’s beautiful in the summertime. Now we’ve got 30, 40 people out having campfires in the lot next door?”

In total, CHNE spoke with 9 neighbouring households that do not want to see the proposed campground go ahead. Residents had a plethora of questions, including about water supply and sewage. They grew even more concerned when developers received a stop work order because they didn’t have all the required permits, which the Eastern District Planning Commission was able to confirm.

The owners of the plot said the practice is normal as long as the municipality doesn’t have a problem with it, and that they stopped working as soon as concerns arose. They also said they will be drilling their own wells, that they won’t build a septic system because RVs will bring their own tanks, and that quiet time will be enforced.

But what neighbours find particularly problematic is that they have so many questions and few answers. In fact, their concerns don’t have be taken into consideration because the law does not require a public consultation to build a campground in that area. It’s something they want to see change.

“It’s a residential community,” neighbour John Alan Aucoin said. “There are a few businesses but very few, and they’re zoned appropriately. But if there is going to be on a going forward basis, no more of this - what my neighbours look at as misuse of the properties around them - the only way that that’s going to happen is if the bylaws are changed.”

Under this bylaw, the site has the same type of zoning as the Chéticamp Island campground. Areas that are arguably different. But as the director of the Eastern District Planning Commission, John Bain explained, the bylaw would have reflected the needs of the community when it was passed in the year 2000. “When the documents were first written and when they were reviewed, we would have went to the community, had an area advisory committee so we would get that kind of community input and have open houses and public hearings and all of that to get that kind of community feedback,” he said. “At the time, when the document was written … there was a feeling that they were similar. So, similar zoning would work for both of those areas. Times change, areas evolve and perhaps an argument could be made that they’re not the same anymore and that the zoning should reflect that.”

For the bylaw to be amended, the changes would have to go through a public consultation and two hearings in municipal council. The amendment wouldn’t be retroactive, so they might not apply to this project.