Details of camp swap emerging

Board members and executives with the Inland Northwest Council of the Boy Scouts say they’re still looking for more information on a possible swap of historic Camp Easton for property on the other side of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

The council, based in Spokane, runs three camps, including 380-acre Camp Easton along Gotham Bay on the east side of the lake.

Discovery Land Co., based in Arizona and developer of the Gozzer Ranch residential and golf club along the lake, is proposing to buy Camp Easton and give the Scouts a new camp on the lake’s west shore.

The undeveloped site being offered covers 270 acres on Sunup Bay. Most of the land is owned by Mountain West Bank, with Discovery willing to pay roughly $8 million for it. Discovery has said it would first develop the new camp for close to $10 million, then exchange it with the council for Camp Easton, said Tim McCandless, the Scout council’s CEO.

At a public meeting with volunteers and Scout families this week in Spokane Valley, council board President Barry Baker told the group no decision had been made and the board was carefully reviewing a list of key concerns.

“It’s all about the boys,” said Baker, insisting that some critics of the proposed swap are wrong in saying the deal has been already approved. No timeline has been set for working through the eventual offer, he said.

Critics have said Camp Easton is a historic treasure and has a powerful emotional appeal for generations of area Scouts. They also say the new camp lacks a beach of equal quality and other features that make Easton popular — so popular that 1,700 Scouts have filled the camp each of the past four summers.

McCandless and Baker say the board’s challenge will be to weigh the advantages of improving Camp Easton versus building a new camp that would be more modern and easier to maintain. At the meeting this week, McCandless said it has been difficult to find money to upgrade Camp Easton, which opened in 1929.

The Discovery offer, McCandless noted, includes a $2.5 million endowment for maintaining and upgrading the new camp. A new camp would be safer, not having a highway through it as Easton now has, and could handle more campers, McCandless said.

Discovery has not yet made a formal offer to buy the camp, McCandless said. The council’s full board of 53 voting members would need to approve the offer to move forward.

Stacey Cowles, publisher of The Spokesman-Review, is a board member.

Two North Idaho business leaders, both voting members of the council board, said they have differing views of the land swap.

Ron Kusche, a Scouts leader and vice president of marketing for Sandpoint-based Litehouse Foods, said the Discovery offer might be a good deal.

“This is the right thing for the council to do, to begin the exploration for how they might build a state-of-the-art, stunning camp for the future,” Kusche said.

He’s not backing the deal yet, but if the offer passes a close and careful review on all levels, he’d support it, Kusche said.

“The world of Scouting is changing, and as it changes we’ve got to realize that we can’t all have log cabins in the dirt. We need to offer state-of-the-art camping options,” he said.

Hayden Mayor Ron McIntire, president of Super 1 Foods, based in Coeur d’Alene, opposes the swap.

“I’m trying to keep an open mind. If you look 100 years ahead, it (the new site) would be a modern camp and maybe ‘better.’ But kids like having the wilderness,” McIntire said.

“If you look at the proposed site, there’s not much wilderness there,” he said, adding: “What’s holding me back? I guess it’s tradition.”