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The national Jamboree draws more than 200,000 participants from across the country. (ASSOCIATED PRESS) |
A civil engineer working with the Boy Scouts of America tried to reassure local residents about the impact of putting the Boy Scout Jamboree in Goshen pass at a recent meeting. But not everyone was convinced.
Isaac Manning spoke to the Rockbridge Partnership and members of the community Mar. 10. Manning said he was there to update area residents and to correct what he said was misinformation about the Jamboree, a national gathering of Boy Scouts. The organization is considering a move to a Scout camp in Goshen for the 2013 Jamboree.
Manning assured residents that the organization wants to reinvent the way the event is run.
“We’re basically scrapping everything the Scouts have done for the past 35 to 40 years,” he said.
Manning said eco-friendly technologies that would help manage a large number of campers and visitors at the site have gotten cheaper in recent years. While the organization hasn’t planned the specifics of how it would run such a camp, Manning suggested that a constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment would be an option.
The Jamboree typically takes place every four years around July and brings thousands of Boy Scouts together. As it has in the past, the 2010 Jamboree is scheduled to be held at Fort A.P. Hill, a property of the U.S. Army located in Caroline County, 40 miles north of Richmond.
But the national organization has been considering the Goshen Scout Reservation as a location for its 2013 gathering and as a possible permanent Jamboree headquarters. The camp is on the Maury River just upstream from Goshen Pass, a state-designated natural area.
At the Rockbridge Partnership meeting, Manning said that although published reports have said that 240,000 people would be in Goshen at once, that figure actually includes vendors, parents and other visitors who will not be staying in the camp itself. And he said not all the visitors will be in the area at the same time.
He suggested that the Jamboree will be run like a “humanitarian refugee camp,” where the infrastructure of an area expands to accommodate the number of people present and then contracts as they leave.
Pete Davis of the Goshen Alliance, an organization dedicated to preserving the environmental integrity of Goshen, expressed concern over the plan.
The Goshen Scout Reservation is bordered by public land, and Davis said he worries about possible undisclosed offerings by the state of public land to the Boy Scouts. He said his worries hadn’t been diminished by three unanswered Freedom of Information Act requests he had submitted for the proposal from Virginia to McCallum-Sweeney, the consulting firm used by the Boy Scouts to investigate locations.
“People are going to be watching,” said Davis.
Others wonder how local roads will handle the impact of so many visitors.
“The roads issue, in my view, is the biggest,” said Carroll Comstock, the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors representative in the Rockbridge Partnership. “I think we can engineer and figure out short-term solutions to everything else.”
Comstock said a large influx of people would put a huge strain on roads leading into Goshen, which would need to be widened to support the increased traffic on Route 42.
Route 42 is bordered by private property and wetlands, so Comstock said the only viable option for widening the road would be to buy land from the property owners.
Manning said the national Boy Scouts organization will speak with the Virginia Department of Transportation in the next two weeks about traffic control in the area. He said the Boy Scouts want to use the railroad that runs through the town of Goshen to bring Scout troops to the area.
“How realistic that is right now, we don’t know,” he said.
Comstock said an economic analysis of the Jamboree proposal would be done by County Administrator Claire Collins, not by the Partnership, because the local economic development group recently lost its director and is re-evaluating its direction.
Collins said that Rockbridge County would not use any taxpayer money to fund the building of the Jamboree site.
But even to start construction in Goshen, the Scouts organization first needs to buy the Goshen Scout Reservation from the National Capital Area Council, a Scout division that is financially separate from the national organization.
Four Scout leaders were killed by electrocution when the pole of a tent they were setting up hit electrical lines above the site at the 2005 Jamboree.
Tents & Events, a company used by the Boy Scouts for the Jamboree, was cited for two safety violations by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and fined $3,000. According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, OSHA found “serious” safety violations in connection with the event. The organization has made safety a priority since then, the newspaper reported.
George Huger, owner of The Southern Inn restaurant in Lexington, is optimistic about the prospect of the Jamboree in this area.
“It never hurts to have another business in town, especially one that will entertain, in my perspective, and then parents and kids will have to come, so maybe they’ll come in to town,” Huger said. “The more people who travel through town, the better off we are.”
Manning emphasized that planning for the Jamboree in Goshen is in the preliminary stages and holds no guarantees. He said the Scouts organization has been “secretive” about its selection process until the final decision because representatives from localities can be disappointed when their localities aren’t chosen.
He also said that Virginia didn’t offer as many incentives as other states the Scouts had been considering for their move.
“When you’ve gone through this process, it’s painful when you don’t get selected,” he said. “Y’all might not feel like that right now, but sometimes people actually get upset when they lose.”
Produced by
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Editing supervisor:
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