Almost 20 people spoke out at an Oneonta Town Planning Board meeting Monday, April 15, voicing their opinions on the proposed campground development at Clapper’s Maple Ridge Ranch as the board inches closer to a decision.
Property owners Fred and Dana Clapper want to build a seven-site campground, plus a bathhouse and pool, on their property that would be used to lodge guests participating in an agritourism program on the property, which currently includes a sheep farm.
They have faced opposition from the get-go from neighbors who say the increased activity would bring lights, noise and traffic that would be highly disruptive to residential life in the rural area.
Several of the attendees Monday said they were against the project, among them many familiar faces to the public debate about the development.
Jenny Koehn — a Planning Board member who recused herself from the discussion and stepped down from the board seating area — spoke first.
She and her husband, David Koehn, live just north of the ranch and have been organizing their neighbors on Lower Reservoir Road and in the greater town in opposition to the plan.
“If this is to go forward, the change in the essential character of our neighborhood is undeniable,” Jenny Koehn said. “As board members who have visited have observed, even normal sounds of living coming from the property are easily audible at our house.”
She proposed changing the location of the campground to a more central location on the property “out of view and earshot of all neighbors.”
Bruce Downie echoed Jenny Koehn’s remarks on moving the campground within the property, saying that the negative impacts would devalue the 50-acre parcel he owns on the north side of a proposed campground, an area with an assessment value of almost $128,000 that could be developed into a high-end house.
“We maintain that the market value will decrease drastically, because no one will want to build a nice house near a campground,” Downie said. “If there is no alternative to not having a campground … [it] should be moved to a location and reduced the size where it would not have a significant impact on the neighborhood.”
Before Clappers took control of the 133-acre property at 184 Lower Reservoir Road in Oneonta, former owner Linda Wilcox bought the property is 2018 and donated a conservation easement on the property to the Otsego Land Trust.
Wilcox, who lives at 207 Lower Reservoir Road, said that she sought a buyer of the property that would continue to use it as a farm.
“The property was on market for five years,” she said. “None of the neighbors came to me asking me if I would sell it to them. It took five years to find someone that I felt would steward the land the way I envisioned it.”
She connected with the Clappers through Farmland for a New Generation New York, a clearinghouse for information about farmland protection and stewardship in which landowners can be matched up with future farmers.
Because the property is part of the land trust, there are only 10 specific acres set aside for future development, and where Jenny Koehn and others are proposing the Clappers move the campground to would be outside of the designated area.
David Koehn said that when he was canvassing the neighborhood gathering signatures on a petition against the project, he spoke with people who would have been interested in buying property, but didn’t want to offend Wilcox with a lowball offer when the price was still listed at $800,000.
Wilcox sold to Clappers for $425,000, according to county property records.
“According to those people,” Koehn said, “they said that Miss Wilcox said, made me an offer, they did not want to insult her with an offer that low. If they had known it was [$425,000], they would have absolutely bought it for that price, as would have us, collectively, as a neighborhood.”
Koehn said that he and others bought property in the area the last time there was “a threat to the neighborhood,” when Springbrook wanted to build a facility there.
“We have a quiet, beautiful, residential neighborhood,” he said. “A farming use would be absolutely welcome in that area … We would also have been on board with one or two cabins, which would not have fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood.”