The Vineyards at Grapevine in Grapevine (Dallas/Fort Worth) Texas is a leased COE park
The cities of Highland Village, Lewisville, Lake Dallas and The Colony lease and run COE parks on Lake Lewisville near Dallas.
Scusset Beach State Park in Massachusetts is a leased COE park, as is Bourne Scenic Park - both built by the COE on the Cape Cod Canal.
The recently shut down web site - CorpsLakes.com - had a list of all projects run by the COE by state across the country - and listed all leased and COE run campgrounds on each project/ lake.
In my experience - most larger COE lakes have several leased properties run by commercial companies, or state/ city governments. All the marina's we see are almost always ncommercial run leased properties. Many places - the Corps has leased campgrounds.
Nothing unusual about the COE leasing out campgrounds.
Each COE district has its own budget. When a district takes a billion dollar damage hit like the Fort Worth District (all in Texas lakes except Texoma and Pat Mayse) did with the flood damage in 2015 and 2016 - it may never recover enough to run the campgrounds properly.
Some COE leased parks have been returned to COE management. Pat Mayse Lake near Paris Texas used to have a state park - but the State of Texas gave it up and the campground (Sanders Cove) has reverted to COE operation.
The vast majority of the money, about 90%, collected for COE run campgrounds stays in the District running the campground. Even lease fees from contracts stay in the district. The COE District must use the money for recreation purposes. But building, upgrading, running campgrounds and day use areas is expensive.
In 2015 we volunteered for 6 months at a COE project in the New England District - cleaning four day use areas. We learned that the previous two years the project had used a combination of short term volunteers and commercial services to do the job. The project had paid close to $24,000 each of the previous two years and did not need to pay that while we were volunteering.
The money went mostly into some repairs of bathroom facilities, removal of dead trees and repairs to parking areas. $24,000 went very quickly with very little 'visible' improvement.
Full-Time 2014 - ????
“Not all who wander are lost.”
"You were supposed to turn back at the last street."
2012 Ram 2500 Mega Cab
2014 Flagstaff 832IKBS TT
