Camp Chasm in Charlevoix

A project to turn a one-time girl’s camp on Lake Charlevoix into a township park has thrown Hayes Township into turmoil.

By Patrick Sullivan | March 17, 2018

There’s a township just northeast of Charlevoix with miles of Little Traverse Bay shoreline along its northern end, and at its south, miles of Lake Charlevoix shore. In between lie 42 square miles of rolling farmland, curving country roads, nature preserves, and woods.

It’s a paradise that’s attracted vacationers and retirees for generations. From the outside, it looks like a place of peace and leisure.

Lately, it’s been anything but.

For years, the township has been embroiled in a debate over details of a plan to develop a park and a boat launch on a serene slice of wooded landscape that, for nearly a century, was home to Camp Sea-Gull, a girls camp founded in the 1920s. The 20-acre waterfront property, once an idyllic place where thousands of lifelong friendships were forged, has become the unwitting incendiary for a nasty fight — one that has pitted neighbor against neighbor, sparked accusations of deception and underhanded tactics, and now threatens to boot three township officials from office in a recall. How did a disagreement over a little lake access get so ugly?

SEEDS OF CONTROVERSY
The mess began in 2011, when Camp Seagull closed and was put up for sale. Hayes Township has a lot of shoreline, but just about every inch is private, and residents wanted access to water — ideally, a beach on Lake Charlevoix, not an unimproved road-end.

Camp Seagull seemed the idea place to create a beachfront park. It offered all of its wooded acreage plus 1,400 feet of shoreline, but it would come at a price. The township, to buy the land, would need the help of the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, which approved a grant of $3,375,000. The township pitched in $500,000, and supporters of the plan, with the help of the Little Traverse Conservancy, raised $625,000.

The establishment of the park was not without controversy. Some lakefront property owners opposed the purchase and, in particular, the boat launch; the formed a group called Save Hayes Township.

“The unsaid concern was that there would be more people going out onto the lake,” said Jim McMahon, a former township official who’s been attending meetings and who, as a private citizen, has watched the Camp Seagull controversy unfold for years.

In the current dispute, the dynamics have changed. Everyone interviewed for this article said they had been in favor of the park when the township bought Camp Sea-Gull.

Now the vocal opponents of the park plans are not only Lake Charlevoix waterfront owners but residents who wanted Camp Seagull and say they feel betrayed; they say the current proposal includes a much larger boat launch than what they had initially imagined and will require too many trees to be chopped down.

“They referred to it as a small boat launch constantly — in all of the advertising, in all of the applications,” said Ron VanZee, township supervisor who, in an effort to quash the boat launch plans, ran for office in 2016 along with two allies. “They forgot to listen to the public. They claim they listened to the public by having public hearings, but they didn’t take the information that they received there and apply it to what they’re proposing.” 

A MOVING TARGET
The original MNRTF grant application, back in 2012, however, included a sizable two-lane boat ramp.

Bill Henne, who’s been involved in township government for 25 years and was an early park supporter, said the pro-boat launch officials have always been transparent and above-board as they’ve developed the park plans. (Although both sides say they support a boat launch of some size, the incumbent majority officials will be referred to as “pro-boat launch” for the remainder of this article.)

Henne questioned VanZee’s actions.

“The supervisor, in my opinion, has not acted in good faith and is trying to sabotage the whole effort,” Henne said.

Clerk Marlene Golovich, one of the three targets of the recall campaign, said she doesn’t know how the matter became so acrimonious.

Golovich said she was involved in the search for land suitable for a park long before the Camp Seagull property became available and long before she was a member of the township board. At the beginning, she said, township officials told her that there were two preconditions for a park: The land must have waterfront, and it must have a boat launch.

“I’m not sure what [the opponents] want. I can’t even speak to that because I’m just not sure what they want,” Golovich said. “The boat launch has been a moving target.”

She said the fissures started to show several years ago amid a debate about what to do with Camp Seagull’s cafeteria building.

“It began with a building — the old cafeteria building — and they wanted to keep it, and we tore it down,” Golovich said. “It needed a lot of work to bring it up to code, and there was no parking for events near there. There was a myriad of problems with buildings.”

THE CAFETERIA CONTROVERSY
Leslie Cunningham, a boat launch opponent and co-founder (with her brother-in-law, Frank Shepherd), of the muckraking Hayes Township Sentinel said she was angered when officials tore down that cafeteria, which she said should have been restored and rented out as an event venue.

It could have been a revenue generator for the township, but it was torn down to make space for parking, she complained.

 “I started asking questions. I said, ‘Have you had [the cafeteria building] assessed?’” she said. “They didn’t assess it or get quotes for how much it would cost to fix it up.”

She said a third-party appraisal determined it could be fixed up for $26,000; she said the township paid $27,000 to have it torn down.

Township officials said restoration costs were determined to be far more than $26,000 and that the building would not have been suitable for events because it sat halfway down a hill and had no nearby parking.

Golovich said the cafeteria decision — and everything else in the development plans — were discussed at public meetings, and the decisions were made in the open.

“Everything is done at a board meeting,” she said.

The cafeteria dust-up caused Cunningham to question other aspects of the plans, including why the park was, from the beginning, tied to a boat launch.

Cunningham said she now understands what the lakefront owners were worried about when they opposed the purchase of the park in the first place.

“I wanted the park, and they said, ‘You can’t afford it.’ They said, ‘It’s going to create all kinds of problems,” she recalled. “They didn’t want to keep us off the lake. This project is not a good project the way it’s going to be built. … They are turning this [park plan] into a [plan for a] boat launch. When they’re done, it’s going to be a boat launch. It’s not going to be a park.

A REFERENDUM IN 2016
By the time the 2016 elections arrived, the debate was so heated they served as a referendum on the boat launch; the results favored the incumbents.

Opponents of the proposed boat launch put together a slate of three candidates, but only VanZee and Matt Cunningham prevailed, leaving the incumbent’s majority on the board at 3–2.

VanZee, though, insists that he was begged to run for supervisor by many residents upset about what was happening at Camp Seagull, and he doesn’t believe the majority has a mandate.

Leslie Cunningham (mother of candidate Matt) also said she didn’t see the results as offering a mandate for the proposed plans because the race for that third swing vote was so close. The race between her ally, challenger Bob Jass, and incumbent Paul Hoadley was close enough in the Republican primary to trigger a recount. Hoadley won by only one or two votes.

“If you don’t think your vote counts … ,” Cunningham said.

Despite how close the race was, one side prevailed, and democracy depends on respect for election results, McMahon said.

“At some point you just have to give up,” he said. “You just have to say, ‘This is what the will of the people is.’”

Rather than relent, however, Leslie Cunningham and Shepherd found another gear to pull.

They started the Hayes Township Sentinel on Facebook the following October, and the next month, they published its first newsletter.

Cunningham said that through the election, she came to believe that her side represented the will of the people.

“People wanted the boat launch smaller,” Cunningham said.

Golovich disagrees with Cunningham’s interpretation. She noted that even after Jass lost in the primary, he ran a write-in campaign during the general election and lost that election, too.

“They didn’t get that. They did not get their third vote. They got two people on, and they didn’t get that majority vote,” Golovich said.

THE TOWNSHIP SENTINEL
Last November, a copy of the first edition of the Sentinel was mailed to every one of the 1,400 or 1,500 households in the township.

It’s a pithy and sharply written look into the minutiae of township business, with a particular interest in anything to do with the boat launch and the three township officials who support it: Golovich, Hoadley and Clerk Robbin Kraft. Although only one of the publication’s four pages is labeled “Opinion,” articles throughout rail against the three officials.

Kraft and Hoadley did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Cunningham said the Sentinel is a nonprofit funded by donations, and that she and Shepherd are volunteers. (Shepherd, the publisher, was out of the country and not available to comment.)

At times, the Sentinel has called the three officials who are targeted in the recall “sinful” and “habitual liars,” and accused them of working against “the vast majority of the township.”  The three officials are routinely written about in derisive terms as and referred to as “the three Amigos.”

Here’s a representative sample of the writing, from the February lead story about the recall: “Township sources who spoke on condition of anonymity said they believe when most township residents go to the polls, they will be singing that old-time favorite, ‘Take me out to the ballgame ... For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out ... ’ while waving goodbye to Hoadley, Kraft, and Golovich.”

The Sentinel has come under criticism from some residents who complain that it is divisive and relies too much on innuendo rather than facts. Some people interviwed by the Express said it’s made them afraid to speak up at public meetings lest they get derisive mentions in the newsletter.

VanZee said he’s glad to have the Sentinel’s support, but he said he’s asked them to cut out the namecalling. 

HABITUAL LIARS
VanZee, who spent decades as a building official for municipalities around Lansing before he moved to Hayes Township full-time in 2006, said he is not part of the recall campaign, but he wrote a column in the February Sentinel that explained why he thought his fellow officials should be booted from office.

In the column, VanZee likened the officials to “habitual liars” who force untruths unto the public. He wrote that they lied about the way the boat launch scored in the documents leading up to the MNRTF grant.

“The truth is, there were NO points, that’s right 0 points, scored on the acquisition grant for a boat launch,” he wrote. “There is not one mention of it on the scoring sheet. In fact the complete opposite is true. There were over sixty (60) combined points for maintaining the natural aspects of the park.”

VanZee said he didn’t mean to call his political opponents “habitual liars.”

“That was frustration based on that the same untruths are told over and over and over again,” he said.

For example, VanZee said that at one point in the process, the township asked the road commission whether the driveway to the park could be moved. VanZee said he learned that road commissioners determined that it could be moved.

“The road commission said, ‘Yeah, it wouldn’t hurt,” he said.

Following that, he said, the officials told the public that the road commission had told the township they had to move the driveway.

In response to this allegation, Golovich sent the Express a letter from the road commission that stated that the driveway needed to be moved in order to accommodate turns onto the highway by vehicles towing boats trailers.

BIG NAMES WEIGH IN
That debate about whether a boat launch needed to be part of the park in order for Hayes Township to get that massive grant from the MNRTF has dragged on in the years since the ink dried on the purchase agreement.

But whether or not a boat launch scored points in the application, former MNRTF board members said a boat launch was critical to Hayes Township getting that money.

Boat launches are not required at parks that receive MNRTF money, but the grants do require that parks provide the public access to recreation. When Hayes Township went to the state to ask for the money, the boat launch was a component of that access.

That’s because Camp Seagull features a steep bluff from the entrance on Boyne City Road down to the beach. Many visitors would not be able to reach the beach without an access road through the park.

Keith Charters, who was on the MNRTF board when the Camp Seagull grant was proposed, said he recalls visiting the site and said he was concerned that the topography precluded the possibility of constructing a boat launch.

Opportunities to create public access on a lake like Lake Charlevoix are rare, Charters said, so he wanted it to work.

“I was concerned,” he said. “It’s pretty narrow. It would be pretty hard to take a vehicle and a trailer in and turn it around.”

Bob Garner was another MNRTF board member who considered the Camp Seagull grant application. He said he doesn’t recall the details, but he is certain the boat launch was critical to the approval.

“It was in the plans,” Garner said. “Whether it would have scored high enough to be funded [without a boat launch] or not, I can’t tell you.”

Garner, a one-time host of Michigan Out-of-Doors, praised Golovich for her work to create the park and improve access to outdoor recreation.

He said it is common for proposed boat launches to become controversies and that, during his tenure, they could bring out the worst in people.

“You ever wonder why no one wants to be a township official anymore?” he said, laughing.

WHAT PARK SUPPORTERS THINK NOW 
Anne Kantola was instrumental in the drive to raise matching funds for the purchase of the property. She said a boat launch was always part of the plan although there were features, such as restrooms and pavilions, that ranked ahead of it. She said she understood why it was necessary to start with the boat launch, however: because it had to be part of the development of the road through the property.

“The boat launch was always part of it and the township officials chose to initiate that project first, perhaps before other projects, because there was a need to create access down by the lake to the public,” Kantola said. “That means a road.”

The township was able to secure around $900,000 in grants to develop the park, McMahon said, and they needed to include a boat launch in order to get money to pay for a road.

“No one will give you grant money to build a road — no one,” McMahon said. “However, there are organizations that will pay for a road if it goes to a boat launch.”

Another early supporter of the park who's grown weary of the tone of the Camp Seagull debate is Sara Gay Dammann, a retired journalist who lives across the road from the park.

She said she always supported the park and always supported the boat launch, but she thinks the boat launch as proposed is too big.

“I firmly support the need for a boat launch,” she said. “I am concerned about the size of the boat launch that’s proposed.”

Ultimately, though, Dammonn said she wishes there wasn’t so much acrimony in the township over the park.

“I am very disturbed by the tone of the debate, and there’s an incredible level of anger that’s making it very difficult for people to be rational,” she said. “I’m disappointed. I would love to see everybody sit down and talk and work out something.”

Dammann noted specifically that she was not directing criticism at Leslie Cunningham or Frank Shepherd, both of whom she said she respects. She said she would not comment about the Sentinel.

THE RECALL
At a March 12 meeting, officials voted 3–1–1 (Matt Cunningham recused himself) to commence construction of the boat launch after they accepted a bid submitted by the lowest bidder. That could mean trees to construct the road will be chopped down before April.

But it does not mean boat launch opponents will go away. VanZee had questions over whether the township had secured proper Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits for the boat launch. What officials submitted to those agencies and what is proposed to be constructed are different projects, he said.

No matter what happens, recall supporters are expected to begin collecting signatures in April to get the recall on an upcoming ballot, even as plans to build the boat launch lurch forward.

McMahon said the grounds for the recall don’t make sense to him. He understands that the other side is upset that they haven’t gotten their way, but they don’t have grounds for a recall.

The other side has some valid concerns, he said. The road plan does require a lot of trees to be cut down. The old cafeteria building was in the way and was sacrificed for a boat launch. McMahon said those are regrettable tradeoffs that are necessary to develop a nice park, but they shouldn’t lead to a recall.

“The only grounds for a recall is some type of malfeasance, some kind of fraud,” he said, “and that’s not the case here.”