Conditional use permit requested
Camp MiVoden wants to make improvement to grounds

Half a dozen children on unicycles whizzed up and down a stretch of blacktop in front of their Camp MiVoden dormitories at the conclusion of an amphitheater gathering on the edge of Hayden Lake.
Nearby staff prepared lunch in the dining hall. And just up the hill, another group of kids practiced archery. Down below a handful of RVs parked on a small spit of sand extending into Hayden Lake.
Activity at the Upper Columbia Seventh-day Adventists’ camp is currently jam-packed into a small portion of Camp MiVoden’s 540-acre site, with 35-year-old buildings clustered on the lakefront where the camp was originally founded in the 1940s.
Camp leaders are seeking to spread housing and activities over a larger area, placing cabins higher up in the woods and expanding capacity from 356 beds to 496 beds including campers and staff.
More importantly they say they want to build better facilities for their campers – cabins that will bring them more in touch with nature than the aging, cramped housing the camp now utilizes.
“The counselors sleep on mattresses in the hallway so they can be with the kids,” said camp spokesman Bruce Christensen of the situation.
“If the goal is to get them into a natural environment, right now you’re looking at asphalt and wood,” said Camp Director Richard Parker.
The plan calls for building 14 cabins in the woods and converting the existing dorms into housing for family campers, replacing the maintenance building and cafeteria and building a new gym and environmental discovery center, as well as moving RV camping from the beach to improved sites uphill. The entire redevelopment project would take about 13 years.
The camp’s application for a conditional use permit to build the cabins and make other improvements is the group’s second in three years. The former application – in that case for 600 beds – was turned down in 2005 by Kootenai County commissioners.
At that time commissioners cited opposition from some neighbors, traffic impacts and stormwater and wastewater issues as key concerns.
Since then camp staff has worked to address the problems and reduced the scope of their request.
Overly high sewage production was solved by the installation of new toilets. The old toilets had been leaking. Wastewater production has now been cut in half.
The number of RV sites under the plan would actually decrease from 25 now to 23 improved sites.
Taking the RVs off the beach is the right thing to do, Parker said.
“When you think about it, it’s going to be cleaner, safer and quieter compared to our current use,” Parker said.
Camp MiVoden paid the Lakes Highway District to mitigate traffic impacts, although Parker pointed out that traffic counts to and from the camp are far lower than the number of vehicle trips the road would see if the property were developed into homes.
Almost 700 homes could be built on the land if it were sold for housing development.
“We’ve got the best piece of camp property anywhere. We could take the money and run, but we don’t want to,” Christensen said.
Most objections to Camp MiVoden expansion come from concern about noise from additional campers.
But those neighbors who support the project said that they believe moving campers up the hillside will decrease the noise coming from the camp.
“What they’re trying to do is get the stuff on the lakefront that shouldn’t be on the lakefront and move it off the lakefront. To me that makes a lot of sense,” said neighbor Barbara Mueller.
Dan Schaffer agreed, saying the camp has been responsive to community concerns.
“We look at it as an actual improvement over what they have now,” he said.