In Kentucky's Battle Of Midway, Horse Farms Fight Massive RV Park Development

A rezoning vote that could permit a super-sized recreational vehicle (RV) and “glamping” park to be built on farmland near Midway, Kentucky, got postponed from July 11 to Aug. 8, setting up the next clash in what has been a three-year civic and legal battle over whether a commercial operation of such a massive scale is right for the low-key city of 1,700 residents and the numerous horse farms in the area.

When the project was first proposed in 2021, Woodall's Campground Magazine billed the “enormous” development as having “973 RV sites, 155 cottages, 37 tent sites, a 200-seat restaurant, a pool with a lazy river, hike and bike trails and access to two miles of Elkhorn Creek on what was known as the Mitchell Farm.”

Thoroughbred farm owners whose properties sit close to the proposed Kentucky Bluegrass Experience Resort (KBER) near Midway Road straddling the line between Woodford and Scott counties told TDN they are trying to make planning officials realize that a development of that size in that area would wipe out a defining characteristic of the Bluegrass region.

“Horses need a place that's quiet. There's just no way we can survive if that RV park goes in,” said Jason Tackitt, whose 20-acre Foxbrook Farm in Georgetown, plus some other leased land, is home to 20 Thoroughbreds “just across the way” from the proposed development.

“I'm not against change and I'm not against progress. But it just has to be a little more thought out than what they're doing now,” Tackitt said.

Tackitt said he knows most of the proposed RV park's abutters are on his side. But he wants the greater Thoroughbred community to know that even though he's trying to rally people against the development, he's a realist who has a Plan B if the project is allowed to proceed.

Protest Signage | Dan Liebman

“As soon as they pass it, we'll put the farm up for sale. We'll probably be moving our operation to Florida. We have a home there now that's already our secondary home. We'll just pack up and go,” Tackitt said.

Representatives of KBER, which is led by Lexington-based developer Andrew Hopewell, have petitioned the Georgetown-Scott County Planning Commission for a zoning change from what is currently an agricultural designation to agricultural/recreational for 96 acres and conservation zoning for 45 acres.

Some locals have resisted the proposal since its outset, citing alleged threats to Midway's small-town character, ecological concerns related to Elkhorn Creek, and safety issues about whether the roads could handle such an influx of large-vehicle traffic.

Others in the area are a just now alarmed to learn that a development of that scale could be coming, even though the project and resistance to it have been in the news for three years.

Proponents of the development tout the purported boost it would provide to the local economy and the RV park's potential to grow the region's tourism. They also underscore the possibility that the farmland, which had been up for sale for a decade before the Hopewell group bought it, could end up getting used for lesser-aesthetic industrial purposes if the RV park gets blocked.

TDN left voicemail and email messages for Hopewell requesting his side of the story about the horse community's concerns, but the developer did not reply to the interview requests prior to publication of this article.

Others involved in KBER have previously stated at public meetings that they are trying to be respectful of the environment and their neighbors. They point to plans to preserve the land as much as possible, in part by setting aside 50% of the site for green space and by making the RV and camping sites spread out and not crowded together.

Debate over the project has even reached the national level. Andy Zipser, an author and journalist who writes about the pros and cons of America's RV parks and the campground industry, earlier this year termed the proposal so huge that, if completed, it would be “one of the 10 largest RV resorts” in the eastern United States.

Tackitt said he can't fathom how an equine-centric community in Kentucky would let a development of that scope come to pass.

“If something like this happens to you, it's like a slap in the face,” Tackitt said. “It's like people saying, 'We don't value horse-raising in this area.'”

History repeating?

Suzi Shoemaker, the longtime owner of the 185-acre Lantern Hill Farm in Midway, told TDN that among the many horse farms that populate the area, she believes hers is the nearest Thoroughbred breeding operation to the proposed development.

Suzi Shoemaker | Keeneland

“I am really the closest,” Shoemaker said in a phone interview during which some of the more vocal of the 80 horses on her property were loudly neighing and whinnying for attention or treats.

“As you can hear in the background, I am one of those horse people who would prefer never to leave the barn,” Shoemaker said. “I have been very active in the past when it has come to preservation issues, and I really do need to get more involved in this one.”

Shoemaker gave a lay-of-the-land perspective of the proposed RV facility and some insight into the local politics that are the both driving the development and resisting it.

“Half of the park is supposed to be in Scott County, which is technically Georgetown,” Shoemaker explained. “The other half is supposed to be in Woodford County, which is not technically Midway, but Woodford County has far more active disagreements about any kind of zoning changes.

“Scott has welcomed development with open arms; hence the Toyota plant that got put there in the 1980s,” Shoemaker said. (Georgetown has a population of 37,000, and Toyota bills its plant there as its largest vehicle manufacturing plant in the world.)

“But I live in Woodford, and we're very provincial here in Kentucky. And the counties really are very different in their thinking. A lot of people in Scott County have been for development because of the money it brings in. Woodford tends to be more about preserving ag land. And I'm definitely in that camp about preserving ag land.

“All farm land is really threatened with subdivision and development, and it's encroaching from Louisville on us. It's just a constant threat,” Shoemaker said.

“We're close to the interstate, right off I-64 at exit 55,” Shoemaker said. “And you can argue, 'Well, you knew that when you bought the place.' And yes, I did. But I would still hope to preserve horse land.

“The biggest problem we have in Kentucky is our roads are very unsafe,” Shoemaker said. “They're very narrow. And as development has encroached on our rural roads, nothing has been done to widen that infrastructure. I moved to Kentucky right out of college in 1978. The roads were scary then, and they're still so scary now that I plan lots of things around when I feel there will be no traffic.

“When you're on the road with a horse trailer on a very narrow road, and you're trying to get to the breeding shed and there's a semi coming at you, and it's taking up part of your lane, you have nothing but trees and telephone poles on your side of the road. You literally have nowhere to go. These roads, at best, are about a lane and half wide,” Shoemaker said.

“I love it here and I would never move. But it astonished me that we can continue to develop subdivisions and housing and all kinds out tourist attractions and never widen the roads. And that's everywhere, all around here. And no one seems to care. That's my strongest argument against the RV park.”

Dick Murphy, a neighbor of Shoemaker and Tackitt, is the co-owner of Heronwood Farm, a dressage and eventing business that is home to a few Thoroughbreds trained in those disciplines.

Murphy said when he and his wife, Karen, first bought their farm near Elkhorn Creek in 1987, they were taking quite a gamble, because the waterway at that time was considered a “dead,” foul-smelling stream devoid of wildlife because of untreated sewage that had been allowed to seep into it.

Elkhorn Creek | Dan Liebman

But thanks to preservation efforts in the decades since, Murphy said, “Now the creek has come back, and it's been amazing to see the resurrection” that has re-introduced fish and attracted all sorts of animals, including eagles, heron and otters.

“But I could just see it going the other way,” if KBER gets built, Murphy said.

Those concerns are very real according to Zipser, the RV and campground industry writer.

Zipser, who describes himself on his blog, Renting Dirt, as a “guy with an acute B.S. detector who delights in calling out snake-oil salesmen and bureaucratic obfuscators,” wrote the following in January 2024 regarding the Woodford/Scott County RV project and the community's fight against it:

“Local resistance isn't always effective, though, if an RV resort developer has exceptionally deep pockets and the locals are slow to cotton on to what's happening. That's been the story in Midway, Kentucky, where town fathers initially welcomed and then belatedly backpedaled from a monster project known as KBER….When the full scope of the proposal–and how it would impact the local community–finally sank in, Midway's city council tried to block the project by refusing to extend municipal water and sewer to the site.

“That was more than two years ago, but despite the lack of subsequent headlines, the developers didn't just go away. Instead they played the long game, culminating in [an October 2023] approval of an ordinance allowing RV parks to operate private sewer plants. Such private plants had been banned a couple of decades ago, after several local mobile home parks had private systems that failed, spilling raw sewage into local waterways. But history doesn't repeat–does it?”

No fix if horse farms leave

Tackitt has been a Thoroughbred owner and breeder for two decades. He said that one of the stunning ironies about the RV park potentially encroaching upon his little slice of horse country is that four years ago, he moved his entire operation from California to Kentucky primarily because he was seeking a more tranquil environment.

“Our farm is on Muir Lane, a street with very little traffic,' Tackitt said. “First and foremost, that's why we bought it–it was out of town and it was quiet. Anybody who raises Thoroughbreds knows that you can't have noise and disruptions. Noise changes horses' sleeping patterns and it affects pregnant mares. We can't have that.”

Although Tackitt said opposition to the RV park is now at a can't-miss level within the community because of roadside signage, mass mailings, and online social media groups devoted to stopping the development, he acknowledged that some abutters–including himself–didn't immediately pick up on the threat.

“Everybody's kind of rallying around it. It's a big deal. But we just found out about it. I guess it's been in the works for several years, and we're just now hearing about it,” Tackitt said.

Still, not every nearby property owner is as outspoken or aware of the RV park's potential disruption as those quoted in this story.

Heronwood Farm | Dan Liebman

Several nearby Thoroughbred farm owners declined to return phone messages seeking comment on the development. One Thoroughbred farm manager in the same neighborhood as Tackitt and Shoemaker told TDN that he wasn't even aware that a project of such a huge scale was so close to becoming a reality just down the street from his paddocks.

“Without a rally of local citizens that are concerned, I think we'll have an RV park,” Murphy said. “But I'm hell-bent not to let that happen.”

Murphy added that he's afraid “resistance may materialize in the wrong way” at the upcoming zoning hearing.

Asked to explain what he meant by that, Murphy said a number of his neighbors have horses but not a business at their property. Their chief beefs will be along aesthetic lines, but civic leaders, he said, are more likely to think twice about approving KBER if citizens instead can pinpoint dire economic outcomes resulting from the RV park.

“There will be many outspoken individuals at the Aug. 8 meeting. Many of them will be heartfelt-'Don't change my environment; I moved here because it's beautiful, and you're going to make it all ugly,'” Murphy said.

“And [the planning commission] will hear that 10 times over,” Murphy continued. “But after the first five or six times? It's glazed eyes, and 'Move on, please.' That's my biggest concern, is that people will show up without any content about how much economic impact it will have on [the horse] business.”

Murphy said abutters need help from the region's larger horse farms. Even if those bigger properties aren't geographically close to the proposed RV park, he said they, too, will be adversely affected by it over time.

“I don't know what the real number is of farms that will be impacted,” Murphy said. “The big, huge farms–the 5,000- or 6,000-acre farms–they're not going to care. They won't even show up, probably. But anyone with a horse farm of 30 acres up to a couple of hundred acres, those are the ones that are going to be most impacted, because they're the most sensitive to the revenue stream that the farm's generating. And they're a big part of the Bluegrass.”

Shoemaker said that even if development is inevitable, horse farm owners need to speak up to shape it.

“I feel that, to some extent, we all have to accept that development is going to happen around us,” Shoemaker said. “There's really almost no one who wants to be doing what I've been doing my entire life, which is managing a horse farm and raising race horses. So you have to expect that development is going to happen, but be much more involved.”

Tackitt said the key to winning the fight against the RV park will come down to making certain that civic leaders know horse owners and breeders will vacate the Bluegrass if enough large-scale development is thrust upon them.

“Sewer problems? Road problems? You can maybe fix those things,” Tackitt said. “But you can't fix it when horse farms just pack up and leave.”