TOWN OF HIGHLAND, NY — After years of discussions, the final word on the environmental impacts of the Camp FIMFO development project will soon be written.

The former Kittatinny Canoes campground in Highland is planned to become Camp FIMFO, with $40 million-plus worth of upgrades turning the site into one of a series of resort campgrounds nationwide. The project has inspired pushback from members of the local community, who argue it will have significant negative impacts on the area.

The Town of Highland Planning Board has the responsibility of analyzing the potential impacts of the project, and of deciding whether to approve it, reject it or approve it with enough conditions to make sure the project does not have an overall negative impact.

The planning board required the applicants to prepare a Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), a detailed listing of the project’s potential impacts, potential issues with the project raised by members of the community and ways the project can address the community’s concerns. That document has been drafted, and is available on the Town of Highland website.

The planning board now has to review the draft FEIS, evaluating whether the project team’s responses do enough to address the community’s concerns. If the planning board judges a response inadequate, it can substitute its own language for the language submitted by the project team.

Items of concern

On Wednesday, June 11, the planning board held the first of a series of workshops aimed at evaluating the FEIS. It will continue to hold workshops at two-week intervals until it evaluates the entire document, with workshops currently scheduled through July.

Several comments came up either on alterations the applicants had made to the project that the planning board noted, or on responses that the planning board felt were inadequate.

The project team has agreed not to apply for a Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement, according to planning board chair Jeff Spitz. A PILOT agreement would have the developers pay a certain set sum, rather than the normal town property taxes, for the initial period of the project’s life.

Spitz said that some stipulations had already been agreed to regarding emergency medical services, including a $25,000 annual payment to Highland EMS.

Highland EMS additionally requested a 3 percent annual increase to that figure, as well as set levels of medical training for Camp FIMFO employees and other public safety items, he said.

The development team had changed several of their planned campsites to smaller structures to get all of the proposed septic systems out of the 100-year floodplain, Spitz said.

The planning board discussed how to ensure everything could be safely evacuated from at-risk areas in the event of an imminent flood.

The planning board discussed how to evaluate the expected numbers of visitors to Camp FIMFO, and whether to evaluate that number based on the pre-existing use pattern of Kittatinny Canoes or on that of other Camp FIMFO locations across the nation.

Kerri Engelhardt, land use specialist with the Upper Delaware Council, said that the project team estimated the overall numbers of visitors to decrease by 17 percent because the maximum occupancy of the new development would be 17 percent less than what came before it. However, the changing use patterns at that site made that comparison disingenuous, she said.