Can a Quarter-Million People Be Packed into Goshen Pass?
The big news of the year is that the national Boy Scouts of America organization is trying to buy an existing regional scout camp near Goshen. The BSA would use the site for, among other things, a quadrennial 10-day jamboree that would bring an estimated 240,000 people, 50,000 of them scouts. (Not all 240,000 would visit for all 10 days.)
You can imagine the furor over some very serious issues, starting with the impact on the natural scenic beauty and moving on to key environmental issues such as water and waste management. Possibly the most provocative question of all is transportation: how, logistically, they would squeeze that many people through the funnel into Goshen. There’s talk of reopening a long-abandoned railroad station in Goshen, and of banning private vehicles and bringing people in by bus, but not many people think those tactics would solve the problem.
The anger seems pervasive outside the town of Goshen itself, population 396 and desperately in need of jobs. The Scouts’ investment in facilities might be as much as $100 million, but even that doesn’t shut down the controversy. Part of the anger arises from a good amount of secrecy that initially shrouded negotiations involving the Scouts and the Rockbridge County and Virginia governments. And the anger seems to be increasing as time passes, instead of subsiding – manifesting itself from jam-packed community meetings to full-page newspaper ads by both sides.
Nevertheless, the plan has to pass through a complex series of hearings, impact assessments and other hurdles, and the outcome is far from sure.
The Roanoke newspaper had a good overview not long ago.
Rockbridge folks have always been cranky about threats to the environment and they’ve made it clear they would prefer to let promises of economic benefit pass them by rather than start down the slippery slope. A few years ago, one of the bottled water companies wanted to buy an option that might (or might not) have led to building a employment-intensive bottling plant that would draw from the county’s abundant underground water supply. Another citizenry uprising, though not nearly as impassioned as the present Goshen one, killed that idea pretty quickly. Same with a paper products distribution plant once planned for Buena Vista.