At the former campground, a zoning disagreement is escalating while questions linger about public parking, lake access, and vital dam repairs. An occupancy-tax windfall is also on the horizon.
(This is the first of two parts.)
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It’s been nearly two years since Ian Rasch, the real-estate developer, and his private-equity-backed Alander Group spent $2.5 million to acquire the historic-but-aging Prospect Lake Park campground, and an adjacent property, located along two thousand feet of lakefront in the town of Egremont.
In multiple interviews last fall (see the “The Developer” series and its campground installment), Rasch described an expansive—and expensive—vision for an “ecological restoration” and upgrades that will “re-imagine” and “elevate” the facility to appeal to what he called “a population of people looking for some other things.”
The purchase immediately rankled those who had long patronized the venue. For generations, seasonal campers spent memory-making summers at the campground with their kids, extended family, and friends. They parked their recreational vehicles (RVs) and pop-up campers at hook-up sites that cost about $2,500 to lease from May into October. Or they rented one of the campground’s rustic cabins for a week, or pitched a tent at one of the twenty-five-acre property’s campsites for just thirty-nine dollars a night, all to enjoy swimming, boating, campfires, cook-outs, and traditional campground recreation.
And, of course, to enjoy each other: For well over half a century, many of the same families returned year after year, their children growing up together on the campground’s beaches, squealing while hurtling down a huge water slide, and roaming the grounds barefoot while making general summertime mischief.
Most of those families assumed, correctly, that the sale meant a once-affordable Berkshires amenity would soon be replaced by something very different—and, no doubt, designed for those with far more money to spend.
An engaging, successful, environmentally minded, and sometimes controversial Berkshire County developer, the forty-six-year-old Rasch has said that the campground’s former owner neglected the property’s water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure for years, leaving it dangerously run-down. He pointed to electric meters and wires “hanging on trees,” outdated cabins, and decades-old camping trailers left on-site that were “filled with rodents.” Also ignored, he said, was a long-needed overhaul of a vital-but-ailing, three-hundred-foot-long, concrete-and-earthen dam on the property—one that’s been flagged by state regulators for years. (Recent estimates of construction costs for the dam’s repair run to three quarters of a million dollars.)
While he concedes the new venture will be more expensive, Rasch has compared it to his other projects, like the redevelopment of the historic, mixed-use Mahaiwe Block in downtown Great Barrington. Sure, rents were low in that building before he bought it. But, he said last year, without the substantial investment he and his investors will make to gut and renovate the building and create new, energy-efficient, luxury rental apartments, the entire structure—including its aging heating, plumbing, and other mechanical systems—would, he claimed, soon become nonfunctional.
