Summer feels like a long way away unless you're a parent thinking about summer camp for your kids. The mountains are a popular destination, but many of the major sleepaway camps there suffered big damage during Hurricane Helene. Now they're working to repair and reopen in time for the summer. Joining Ely Portillo to talk about this and other news stories is Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter.
Ely Portillo: You talked to a few camps. What are they telling you about what Helene did and what their plans are?
Tony Mecia: Yeah, Ely. Initially, a lot of these camps up in the mountains were pretty concerned about some of the damage that they had got there, a lot of downed trees, you know. There were mudslides and flooding, obviously. in some areas. But we talked to the North Carolina Youth Summer Camp Association, and they told us that about 15 of their 75 member camps had sustained some kind of significant damage.
We talked to some of these camps, and they were actually fairly enthusiastic about the prospects of opening next summer. They said many of them have had volunteers up there helping, you know, clear roads, do repairs. We talked to Camp Lutheridge in Arden. Its road had been blocked. So you know, there are a lot of repairs to be made.
Some of these camps are housing emergency workers. We talked to a camp in Lake Lure — Camp Lurecrest — and it said, 'Well, we sustained some damage for sure, but we're in better shape than a lot of the rest of Lake Lure', and they expect to be open this summer. So I think things, although there was some initial concerns, I think the overall trend line looks pretty good for a lot of these summer camps.
Portillo: And it sounds like one challenge that camps, like a lot of the businesses in areas that weren't so hard hit, is maybe differentiating themselves from the areas that were completely devastated.
Mecia: That's definitely true. And you know, you go to some of these places, I was in Blowing Rock last week, and you could tell, I mean, their tourism was down — and Blowing Rock is in pretty good shape. I mean, they had some damage. Watauga County definitely had some damage, but you wouldn't know it from walking around there. But a lot of tourists are staying away, and so that does trickle down a lot.
Portillo: Well, let's turn now to Camp North End, where the developer says a rogue towing company set up shop recently. What's going on there?
Mecia: Yeah. The developer of Camp North End is Atco Properties and its co-CEO, Damon Hemmerdinger, said in a post on LinkedIn last week that he had a random person come into the office there at Camp North End and ask about being their towing operator, and they said 'Well, we already have a towing operator, but here we'll give you some contact information. We can follow up later.' So then, unbeknownst to him and the rest of Camp North End, eight towing signs went up and the next day a couple of cars wound up being towed with a bill presented to the owners for $5,000, just completely unauthorized. He says they got their general counsel involved. They got the cars released without having to pay any money, but he went to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, who said it's a civil matter and there's nothing they can do. So he was a little bit, I think, frustrated with that.
Portillo: Wow. And, finally, you looked into a question that has bedeviled me, and I think a lot of other people out there, and that is Ballantyne's official boundary. What did you find?
Mecia: We were answering a reader's question about that. And like a lot of areas in Charlotte, there's no correct answer. It's not like, well, you cross the street here and that's definitely not Ballantyne. You know, we talked to one of the developers of Ballantyne that said originally it was a much more compact area, you know, around the Ballantyne Corporate Park. You have those four monuments on Ballantyne Commons Parkway and Johnston Road, but it was sort of centered around there. But over time, more places refer to themselves as Ballantyne. And so if you look at the map, it's real, kind of, expanded. I think we're seeing this in a lot of neighborhoods. You know, you see this in the Sugar Creek area that's getting redeveloped and being referred to as NoDa. You're really seeing sort of a redefinition of a lot of a lot of these areas in Charlotte.
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