Court rounds on Camp Easton trade reflect just part of bad real estate deal

The saga of the long-term fate of Boy Scout Camp Easton on the east side of Coeur d’Alene marked another chapter two weeks ago when a district court judge in Coeur d’Alene promised to take another look at his earlier decision.

According to a report by Tom Sowa in the July 20 Spokesman Review, Judge John Luster vowed to take another look at arguments advanced by residents and Scout families who are opposed to trading the camp site.

The Camp Easton issue emerged last year when an Arizona development company offered to trade the Inland Northwest Scout Council land along Windy Bay for the Camp Easton site.

The Windy Bay site, now officially tagged Camp Easton at Sunup Bay, is 113 acres smaller than the present Camp Easton, but Discovery Land Co. has offered to build all the facilities of a new camp and back that up with a $2.5 million endowment for upkeep of the council’s camp facilities, according to a flyer mailed out to scout officials in NW council troops.

Camp Grizzly above Harvard, Idaho, is one of the installations which could be expected to benefit from the endowment fund for camp upkeep. Most scout troops in this district spend their summer camp weeks at Grizzly. A lot of the long-term upkeep at the camp has been done by volunteers.

According to Sowa’s SR report, Kathlene Kolts, who represents Scout families and residents who oppose the site trade, presented an argument that the 1929 gift of land for Camp Easton created a charitable trust that restricts the recipient, in this case the scout council, from selling off what the trust has provided them.

Frederick Fitze purchased the land at Gotham Bay and subsequently donated it to the Boy Scouts. Fitze, in the wake of an approach by Scout officials in 1929 to purchase the Gotham Bay land, decided instead to donate it. He asked the scouts to name the camp after Stanley Easton, a Silver Valley mining executive, who had earlier donated land near Bennett Bay for a Scout camp.

Kolts in her argument July 19 asked Judge Luster to reconsider based on a decision in a New York state case in which Cornell University was restrained from selling a site which it had been made available to it through a trust.

Although Kolts could prevail in her legal argument on behalf of her clients, the Camp Easton trade should be rejected outright as a bad real estate deal, for the scouts.

The proposal apparently has appealed to the Inland Northwest Council executive corps because it includes an all-new camp and that $2.5 million endowment for upkeep of all the camps.

But it still weighs out to be a poor trade, even with the extra money features.

Fitze’s gift on Gotham Bay provided the scouts with a spectacular site on the lake. Easton’s main assembly area and its central mess hall are located on an open meadow which overlooks the lake.

Scouts can be in the camp’s main gathering area and view other members of their troop, or other troops, venture out in canoes from the camp dock on the bay. The campfire site along the lake provides scouts with a scene they will recall through the balance of their adult lives.

This is very valuable real estate and that’s why Discovery Land came calling. Sites like Gotham Bay are becoming rare properties, and the market for these sites on the high end of the national, and maybe international, real estate market sometimes is a concept hard to grasp for the sellers, or in this case the possible traders.

Last fall, after the Camp Easton Forever filed a lawsuit to restrain the scout leaders from closing the deal, the IE council put out a six-page, full color flyer to scout leaders to help them evaluate “a proposal to build a new Camp Easton.”

The mailing was in advance of an announced web survey which was said to be aimed at polling the scout populace on their feelings about the proposal.

But the evaluation mailing was more like one of the super mailings now being circulated by political candidates with heavyweight campaign backers.

It featured a few photos of the present Camp Easton followed by designer sketches and maps for the proposed Windy Bay site. Included were sketches of what the “Grand Pavilion on Sunup Point” and the proposed “Year-round Dining Lodge” would look like.

The sketch proposal for the waterfront includes a series of features, like zip lines and hand over hand racing lines. All features from the designer’s option list, and all features guaranteed to be scorned by veteran scoutmasters who have volunteered to preside over a batch of 11-15 year-old boys with some level of control and an assumed vow to return homeward with a minimal injury list. How many zip line zips will be logged until a calamity hits?

Two other features of the evaluation slick sheet are indicators of the push for the cash on the part of the IE scout council. One points out the rehab cost for Gotham Bay is now in the $7.2 million range. That figure is based on the valuation of the facilities Discovery says they will build across the lake. In other words, if the council doesn’t accept the new camp it faces the $7.2 million cost of remodeling the present camp.

It’s sort of circular logic.

One solid tool for evaluating the trade proposal is a topographical map. The topographic elevation lines tell the tale. Camp Easton at Sunup Bay will essentially be on the side of a hill. The evaluation sheet notes the aquatics area will be at the bottom of a 175 foot descent from the main camp. Also, the proposed “aquatic facility” will include “a controlled-depth” swim area. The bottom of the swimming hole will be suspended from the dock piers.

That suspended bottom design is required because the steep hill descent down to the swimming hole keeps right on going down at the water line.

Camp Easton has its drawbacks, such as Highway 97 which crosses the camp’s property on its run along the east side of the lake.

Scouts cross the highway to get to camp facilities on the upland side of the of Gotham Bay camp. The highway is a hazard, but it has been safely crossed by scouts for decades.

However, its listing as a hazard has been amplified as an immediate need. One of the points for leaving Gotham Bay, they argue, is the cost of a $1.2 million tunnel that will have to be built under the highway.

The real tunnel problem for the scouts and their families is tunnel vision by some of their leaders and executives who could be on the brink of closing a bad real estate deal.