Owners of a local campground say they plan to expand with dozens more campsites after Worcester County authorities cleared the way with an agricultural rezoning of the property.
The Ewell family successfully petitioned the Worcester County Board of Commissioners to rezone 33 acres of Island Resort Campground, located off Croppers Island Road in Newark, going from an A-1 to an A-2 zoning designation.
Once the commissioners finalize the zoning change, which is expected soon, the Ewells plan to add 53 campsites to the campground’s existing 164 campsites. Their original proposal was for 62 sites.
The purpose of the rezoning was to return the existing campground to a legal conforming use. Rental campgrounds like theirs had been allowed in the A-1 Agricultural zoning area. And the property had been A-1 when it opened nearly 20 years ago.
However, the county’s 2009 comprehensive rezoning put their acreage into the A-2 zoning, where rental campsites are not permitted. It means the Ewell’s property has been nonconforming, and expansion of campsites wasn’t allowed for nonconforming properties, according to their attorney Mark Cropper.
“You can’t expand a nonconforming use by more than 50 percent,” Cropper said in an interview. “It became very difficult to figure out, how to define the scope of the original campground, for the purpose of calculating whether this expansion did or did not exceed that 50 percent.