From increased fees to changing parking zones, people saw many changes on the Homer Spit this past summer.
A major change included the city of Homer shifting campground management responsibilities from the parks department to Homer Port and Harbor in April this year. This put Port and Harbor in charge of budgets, administrative tasks and enforcing parking. However, the city still faced numerous challenges in managing the campgrounds – which includes the Fishing Hole campground, Mariner Park and Tent Camp West Beach site.
In city manager Rob Dumouchel’s report on Monday night’s meeting, he stated the change was an overall success, but also brought up issues around funding sources and operations.
Funding for the campgrounds originally came from the city’s general fund, but it now comes from the port and harbor enterprise fund. This fund mainly goes towards maintaining harbor infrastructure and services.
During the council meeting, Mayor Ken Castner raised concerns about how managing a campground aligns with the purpose of the enterprise fund, which he said is to promote the economy and produce sales taxes for the city.
“For us to say, ‘well, you're doing that, okay, but, you know, we want you to manage this as well and this as well,’” he said, “and it did not feel like a good fit to me initially, and after doing it for a season, I thought it was kind of awkward.”
However, when speaking a couple days after the meeting, Port Director Bryan Hawkins said the money goes back to them as well.
“We stood up the extra effort to do the enforcement and manage the campgrounds but then the revenues from the campgrounds came to the enterprise,” he said.
Hawkins also highlighted challenges in how each department’s responsibility in maintaining campgrounds was unclear.
“It took a lot of communications back and forth to work those details out, identify the issue, and then figure out who was going to cover it,” he said.
Hawkins said the departments will discuss these details through this winter.
