A divided County Council left the fate of an Imperial RV park development up to County Executive Dennis Gannon.
The council voted 3-3 on June 22 for a request from applicant Mastodon RV Park LLC to rezone a 17-acre property at 5300 Jeanette Drive off Jeffco Boulevard from a planned mixed residential use district and a single-family residential district to a planned mixed-use district and development plan.
Councilman Bob Tullock (District 7, House Springs) abstained from the vote, and Gannon broke the tie, siding with the council members wishing to deny the development.
Councilwoman Lori Arons (District 3, Imperial) lives close to the proposed RV park property and said she has concerns that large RVs pulling into and out of the park onto Jeffco Boulevard could cause crashes.
Arons voted against the application, along with Councilmen Billy Crow (District 2, Arnold) and Tim Bennett (District 5, Festus). Councilmen Brian Haskins (District 1, High Ridge), Charles Groeteke (District 4, Barnhart) and Tim Brown (District 6, De Soto) voted in favor of it.
The RV park plan included 97 concrete pads for RVs, a dog park, a pickleball court, a pond and a walking path. The developers reserved a strip along Hwy. 61-67 near the main entrance of the property for future commercial frontage, which could have included offices, retail shops and restaurants.
Tullock said he abstained from voting because he was contacted by people about the RV park with new information not previously shared in the public hearing, staff report or original petition. Council members are expected to base their decision solely on what is presented to them at the hearing and in the staff report and application documents, he said.
“Once you hear something, you can’t unhear it,” Tullock said. “I had a couple of people call me four or five times, maybe over the last month, and I would tell them that I can only consider what was introduced to the County Council as evidence. Sometimes you can dismiss (the unwarranted comments), but this one I couldn’t. Basically, it compromised my vote.”
P and Z decision
Groeteke said the RV park application was fraught from the start, when the petitioners were heard at a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on April 23. Only four of the nine commissioners attended the meeting, with the commissioners present split on the vote for the park. Ultimately, the petition was passed to the council with no recommendation from the commissioners.
Commissioners Rodney Wideman and Drew Ishmael voted in favor of the petition, and Johnathan Sparks and Michael Siebert voted against it.
Commissioners Jessie Scherrer, Chris Moenster and Jeffrey Spraul were absent from the meeting, and two seats were vacant, since both Danny Tuggle and Mike Huskey failed to file renewal applications before their terms expired on April 10. Both commissioners were reappointed to the board at the April 27 County Council meeting.
Groeteke suggested at the May 11 council meeting that a second public hearing could be held regarding the RV park, with more commissioners present. The council’s legal counsel advised, though, that because there was a quorum at the April 23 P and Z meeting, a second public hearing is not warranted.
“I wasn’t really happy from the start, because there wasn’t a full slate of commissioners at the hearing,” Groeteke said. “I would have liked to have heard from the full Planning and Zoning Commission. They’ve done a pretty decent job, I believe, and I do respect the decisions that come out of Planning and Zoning Commission.”
At the May 26 council meeting, Arons proposed that the RV park petition be taken up for a vote on a future agenda as a resolution to deny. Arons called the lack of a recommendation from P and Z, either for or against the RV park, unfortunate.
“We don’t know what Planning and Zoning, if a full commission had been there, what the discussion would have been and what they would have decided,” she said. “That makes it a little harder for us.”
Groeteke said he voted in favor of the development because, under its current zoning of planned mixed residential use and single-family residential, more “non-desirable” developments could be built there.
“If (the RV park) got passed, we would have known what was going in there,” Groeteke said. “The density could be very much dramatically increased in the way it’s presently zoned.”
Safety concerns
Arons said her concern with the application wasn’t so much the idea of an RV park, but rather the proposed location of the park. The park’s only entrance and exit lie on an S-curve on Jeffco Boulevard, where the speed limit is 50 mph.
“There’s no designated turn lane,” Arons said. “If you already have a limited site distance to turn out of the street onto Jeffco with a 37-foot motor home, trying to make a left turn, it’s almost impossible. That’s just an accident waiting to happen.”
Arons said attached villas or townhomes may be more appropriate for the property than campers and RVs, which are more transient in nature. She said many of her constituents agreed with her.
“I think that would be a beautiful place to put villas, especially with the (proposed) walking track and the pickleball courts. Something permanent, so that all you have are cars turning on and off Jeffco. I think that would be an appropriate, lovely place for that kind of development.”