Jessica Cejnar Andrews / Thursday, March 17, 2022 @ 12:22 p.m. / Local Government
Another Company Makes Pitch to Crescent City Harbor Over Its RV Parks, Says Plan Includes the Long-Term Residents
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Another company, one with ties to Crescent City, has offered the harbor district an alternative to Alex Lemus and Renewable Energy Capital for redeveloping its two RV parks.
Kay Fry, project manager for On-Site Development, a construction business based out of the Los Angeles area, told Crescent City Harbor Commissioners on Tuesday that she knows Bayside RV Park well — her grandmother managed the park for its former owners and Fry played there as a child.
Speaking for longer than the three-minutes allotted for public comment thanks to the donated time of the RV parks’ tenants, Fry noted that the Harbor District had been negotiating with Lemus since he answered a request for proposals to redevelop the port about a year ago. She said she and her father, On-Site
Development founder Jim Fry, developed a plan that includes the parks’ long-term tenants.
“We believe REC has unrealistic expectations about tourism in this specific area, particularly in the winter months,” Kay Fry told commissioners. “These tenants are what keeps the lights on. A business plan for the RV parks should include them, and we would love to share an idea with the Board so we can give you guys a fresh perspective.”
Fry approached Harbor Commissioners roughly a month after Lemus held a Q&A session with residents, many of whom are afraid that they will be told to leave to make way for the redevelopment of Bayside and Redwood Harbor Village RV parks.
Lemus, who was instrumental in getting the port’s photovoltaic solar system producing, unveiled his redevelopment project plan in August 2021. In addition to upgrading the landscaping and infrastructure at Bayside, his project includes purchasing Airstream travel trailers and cabins for short-term overnight stays.
He also proposes placing electric vehicle charging stations at the old Spotty’s Car Wash near Fisherman’s Restaurant, installing solar panels on the former car wash building and building a co-op for local fishermen to sell their catch to local businesses.
Lemus has also promised to create individual transition plans for each long-term RV park resident — there were 86 as of Feb. 14 — saying he wouldn’t sign a lease for the parks or break ground on construction until those plans were finalized.
“I’m not here to make anybody homeless — I don’t want that on my resume,” Lemus told the Wild Rivers Outpost and KFUG Community News last month. “I think we have to sit down (and ask residents), ‘Do you want to live here during the redevelopment? Do you want to stay?’ ‘Cause I’m not here to evict anybody.”
Fry has already spoken to RV park residents. She said she and her father wanted to get a sense of what they were comfortable with and whether they wanted to stay or go.
“What’s their interest in all this? That’s how we got our foot in the door and worked our way to having a little space in the meeting,” Fry told the Outpost on Wednesday. “We really needed the donations of time to make it possible and the tenants were incredibly supportive with us and that warmed our hearts.”
Fry said her father began his business with custom home building and has worked his way up to spearheading multimillion dollar hotel renovations. One of On-Site Development’s most recent projects is a $22 million hotel restoration in Nashville.
Fry said she and her father also like to “follow the market” and are seeing an increasing interest in RVs and a need for places to park them. One of the consultants she and her father work with attended a convention in Las Vegas around the time the Harbor District sent out its request for redevelopment proposals.
“They were blown away with the absolute need there is for RV parks and for RV parks to be updated to accommodate the RVs being manufactured, which are much larger with larger pop-outs,” she said. “When we saw this trend happening, we thought we would look into it. When we saw the RFP for Bayside and Redwood Harbor Village, of course, it piqued our interest more from an emotional standpoint.”
Fry said she and her father would have answered the Harbor District’s RFP had it not been for another project that came their way, building a $2.4 million RV park in Cave Junction. Though the Cave Junction project isn’t finished, Fry said she became interested in seeing where the Harbor District was at with its redevelopment project.
Though she agrees with Lemus on starting with the RV parks when it comes to making the port more attractive to tourists, Fry said it’s unrealistic to rely on those visitors year-round. She said On-Site Development isn’t ready to say what its vision for the parks are, but one possibility is changing the layout of Bayside to accommodate both overnighters and long-term tenants.
On-Site Development representatives are also hoping to find a workaround a California Coastal Commission rule against people living in beachside RV parks for more than 30 days, Fry said.
“We’ve done our research and it seems there is a way around it that typically results in a new lease every 30 days,” she said. “It’s not feasible to ask people to be kicked out of their home for a few days and come back. We’re working on that too.”
Fry said On-Site Development has come up with a business plan, which includes market research for the Crescent City-Del Norte County area. It also plans to submit blueprints and sketches “to give commissioners a sense of what it could look like in real life.”
On Tuesday, Fry told Harbor Commissioners that they’ve given REC “exclusive right to negotiate.” The commission’s decision to award the RFP to REC has led to a lack of competition so far, she said.
“We all know negotiations can’t last forever,” she said. “I don’t know what delayed the negotiations, but obviously the Board has been hesitating. Perhaps you don’t have other options. I’m here to give you another option.”
Though Lemus has leased an overflow lot belonging to Redwood Harbor Village and runs it as an RV park, he has not yet negotiated a lease for the two RV parks with the harbor, Crescent City Harbor District Board President Rick Shepherd said Tuesday.
In response to former supervisor Roger Gitlin, who asked the Harbor District to have a discussion about the RV park projects on every agenda, Shepherd said he and his colleagues are still negotiating with Lemus.
“Then we will have open discussions on a meeting-to-meeting basis on the relocation part and a lot of different things,” Shepherd said. “But nothing can move forward until we have a lease and we do not have one at this time.”
In response to Fry’s impromptu presentation, Shepherd said because it wasn’t on the Harbor District’s agenda for Tuesday, he and his colleagues couldn’t comment on her proposal. He asked Fry to give a presentation at the district’s next meeting on April 5.
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