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Quick Overview of the Situation
Below is a quick overview of the campaign to save the Red so far and some brief commentary on some major issues. Use these links to navigate to each section more easily:
Overview | Conservation & Safety | Infrastructure | Overcrowding and Traffic | Traditional Development | Rural Gentrification and Community Feeling | Use of Public Funds | Workforce | Zoning | New Branding and Adoption by Businesses
In addition, below are links are larger pages with more detailed information:
Jump to Full Timeline
Jump to About the Issue
Jump to Breakdown of Project Parts
Jump to How to Get Involved
The Red River Economic Development, LLC (RRED) is a nonprofit group created 2018 under the auspices of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce with the expressed intent “to develop a masterplan for a destination resort and associated tourism attractions in the Red River Gorge area.” The group was formed specifically to apply for half a million dollars in grant money to fund the plan for a private resort, according to their website. RRED is currently pursuing the development of a $135 million privately-owned “destination resort” on 891 acres in Slade, Ky, little more than one mile from the Red River Gorge.
We at Red River Gorge United (RRGU) oppose this development.
This process of regional planning for the RRG has apparently been underway by the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Chamber President/former President, Kentucky Chamber Foundation, four county judge executives (elected officials like mayors for counties) from the four counties that surround the Gorge, four bank owners, several land developers, potential investors, state officials and politicians since 2013.
However, most of us in the local community who actually reside, recreate and pay taxes in the area surrounding the Gorge only learned about this development project by way of a public meeting hosted by the local tourism office in October of 2019. The original RRED concept paper was even completed in October 2018.
Input from local residents and business owners was not gathered UNTIL AFTER THIS GROUP (RRGU) WAS FORMED IN OPPOSITION TO THE PROJECT.
The reason many individuals have objected to the development is the management leaders have taken a “top-down” approach, moving forward with planning without either first consulting the people who already live, work, and recreate here. The discussion should have been started with a community-based approach, this is the position of RRGU. This kind of process should be guided in a way which will ultimately benefit and better-enable the residents of the targeted region.
RRED received $1,000,000 in federal and state funds to solicit this masterplan. They envisioned a themed village, and added land use and branding controls in an unclear proximity around the development, possibly 10 miles or more. About the Issue
Their project timeline chugs along quickly with an option to purchase a privately owned 891 acre site in Slade, KY adjacent to the Mountain Parkway. The original three-year option for RRED to purchase the land started in 2019. When that passed without finding an investor, members of RRED, including Dave Adkisson, spun off from that group to create Red River Property Holding Group LLC on March 31, 2021 which purchased the land and now holds it for another exclusive three-year option.
While they look for investors they will retain RRED as exclusive marketing partner. Mr. Adkinson, who guided the project and garnered more than $1 million in public funds for RRED to push the project forward now stands to profit personally from the project’s success. According to the Lexington Herald Leader, “Adkisson said his role was vetted by lawyers for any potential conflicts of interest.”
It is RRGU’s opinion that the lack of transparency in this many-years long development of this project, including the use of public funds and involvement of local officials with the end goal of creating a private and for-profit entity, is simply not acceptable. This project is oversized and is we do not see a scenario that does not include significant negative impact on our treasured RRG, our homes, and our places of business.
Below are a number of local concerns.
Jump to Conservation & Safety
Jump to Infrastructure
Jump to Overcrowding and Traffic
Jump to Traditional Development
Jump to Rural Gentrification and Community Feeling
Jump to Use of Public Funds
Jump to Workforce
Jump to Zoning
Jump to New Branding and Adoption by Businesses
Also be sure to check out our other pages:
About the Issue
Jump to Key Points
The RRG area is incredibly important for its biological and geological diversity. RRG is part of Central Appalachia, one of the top five most biodiverse regions in the world. Home to more than 100 natural sandstone arches, it is second only to Utah (home to Arches National Park) for number of natural arches.
Because of this incredible richness, the Red River Gorge has been designated a National Natural Landmark and National Archaeological District, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The section of the Red River in the upper gorge is also Kentucky’s only federally designated Wild and Scenic River. This intricate canyon system features an abundance of high sandstone cliffs, rock shelters, waterfalls, and natural bridges.
The multitude of sandstone and cliff-lines have contributed to this area’s becoming one of the world’s top rock climbing destinations, a sport which is aided by the local Red River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition.
Because of its unusual, rugged nature, the Red River Gorge features a remarkable variety of ecological zones.
RRED has repeatedly expressed that their development will bring in a “new kind of visitor, inexperienced with the Gorge” and touted that this will decrease competition with local businesses. But it is exactly this “inexperience” which is our primary concern. A huge increase in visitors will have an irreversible impact on all aspects of the Gorge ecosystem. We worry about litter, damage to trails, irresponsible destruction of natural plants and features, as well as parking, traffic and trail congestion just to start.
The Gorge is a dangerous place. Even experienced hikers die at the Gorge regularly, an influx of inexperienced hikers and climbers will almost certainly lead to increased deaths and increased demands for search and rescue – further straining local resources.
RRED and its supporters claim that resort visitors will stay within the boundaries of the resort and largely not need to venture to the Gorge. However, we cannot reasonably believe that tourists will want to visit a “destination resort” built around the Red River Gorge brand yet at the same time decline to actually visit the Gorge itself.
That just does not make sense and we feel it is deceptive to suggest otherwise.
RRG is home to lifelong residents with deep local wisdom, natives who are archaeologists, longtime residents who are biologists, historians, geologists who have made it their home because of its unique nature, intent on conserving the region. Involving the local knowledge base is imperative to creating slow, sustainable growth.
Slade is a very small unofficial town lacking even a traffic light or post office. All utilities were constructed to meet the needs of the largest customer in the area – Natural Bridge State Resort Park – which has 17 cabins and 35 rooms, as well as a restaurant and meeting areas. The proposed new resort represents triple or quadruple (or even more!) the number of rooms, and therefore triple or quadruple the requirements for electricity, water, natural gas, and sewer.
The Slade area is serviced by a volunteer fire and rescue department. While this is addressed to some extent in the RFP, the current community deserves to have reliable access to these basic needs. Further the current community should not bear the cost of the upgrades that will be needed to support the proposed resort, especially since their proposal would divert nearly all of the taxes brought in back to the resort rather than the local county via incentives.
RRED touts that they will bring many new visitors to the Gorge, but do almost nothing to address traffic and overcrowding in the area besides only 2 PARAGRAPHS in the Stantec report where they suggest a bus system similar to that of a national park. However, they provide absolutely no explanation, feasibility, or details how such a giant bus system might be established, funded, managed, or implemented in an area with notoriously tight roads.
Red River Gorge currently attracts 750,000 visitors annually [NEED SOURCE]. A study guiding RRED from HVS in 2017 stated that a fully developed theme village (which was part of RRED’s original concept paper) would attract 1-2 million visitors per year. While changes have been made since the original HVS study the 2020 Stantec Preliminary Analysis and Opportunities Report repeated “HVS claims that a fully developed future themed community would attract 1-2 million annual visitors.” According to this same 2020 Stantec Preliminary Analysis and Opportunities Report the resort would attract between 546,000 and 738,000 annual guests.
During the high season our area already struggles with a full-to-overloaded infrastructure due to tourists and visitors. Easy examples are trailhead parking lots which are sometimes overfilled, as well as long traffic lines and tested tempers at the historic Nada Tunnel. There is also the continuing conversations between the National Forest Service and the Red River Gorge Climbers’ Coalition over rock-climbing crag accessibility, not to mention the constant vigilance and volunteer time currently needed to battle against trash and detritus in our waterways and along roads. These are just a few examples.
If the 546,000 visitors number is accurate then this would represent a 72.8% increase in total park visitors from 750,000 to 1,296,000. Crowds of this size are generally seen by the National Park System with the budget allocations provided to a national park. Since the Gorge and region surrounding it is not a national park and is managed by the National Forest Service the total budget available for the Gorge region is significantly less than other regions which receive visitors in the numbers above which include projections by RRED.
Other outdoor recreation areas and national parks which receive visitation numbers in this range are:
Every one of these parks is better equipped with more budget, acreage and resources to deal with a larger influx of visitors than the Red River Gorge. Since the Gorge is not a national park the resources available to park officials to perform maintenance are far more limited than in other comparable parks across the country. While more tourism can be good in some ways, overdoing it can also cause current visitors to abandon the area. Perhaps most critically we risk losing the current visitors, visitors who tell us repeatedly that they value the unique nature of the RRG, the fact that it is small, the fact that businesses are small and locally-owned, and the fact that the current atmosphere is not one of industrialized tourism.
A main concern about this project has been the way which planning and organization has been conducted. RRED’s idea of community planning seems to be “top-down” version of development.
This the opposite of the way we here at RRGU are organized.
While this project has been in development since 2012 or earlier, the local public was only made aware in 2019 via a meeting called by the local tourism office – not the RRED development group.
We support a truly local, place-based community plan for our future which should be built from the ground up with involvement from local residents, organizations, and businesses. Any plans for the future should include the existing assets of culture, nature, history.
This kind of gentrification is dramatically affecting small rural communities in Eastern Kentucky and elsewhere. It is changing these communities forever, especially those located in areas of natural beauty like ours which offer “opportunities” for developers with deep pockets. It has great power to harm or destroy the authentic “mom and pop” feel of an area.
Asheville, NC (another southern Appalachian community) is a case in point: a town of 90,000 with 10 million visitors a year. While tourists love Asheville they don’t see the ugly truths such as tripling of rents or the dislocation of low-income locals, artists, and service workers, who are then forced to leave the area entirely or commute an hour to work.
One thing business owners hear frequently is that people appreciate the small, locally-owned businesses that already exist in the area. As Slade and its surroundings grow we would want similarly-minded, unique and interesting shops or restaurants to be encouraged, and surely not stifled. We at RRGU are pro-development as long as that development is at a reasonable scale and aims to work around the community in an organic and supportive way.
RRED has been awarded $1 million to use for creating a master tourism plan for the region built on bringing in their proposed “destination resort” development to the region, money which includes $500,000 from the State of Kentucky. Further, under the proposal put forward any taxes the resort might generate would go back into the resort, rather than to the county, for many years following completion of construction as part of their incentives package.
In the RRG area or other areas of Eastern Kentucky this money could be used in many other ways that would provide an immediate benefit to the residents and locally-owned businesses already in place.
Many local infrastructure projects could benefit, but one example of this would be access to reliable and affordable internet service to local residents. Endowments for establishing locally-owned businesses would be far better received compared to this hugely-dense development which will almost certainly be owned by someone from outside of Kentucky
RRGU supports development of good quality jobs in the region. We don’t see a resort as providing these sorts of opportunities. The lower-wage service jobs already exist in the Gorge. We support the development small sustainable manufacturing, especially around the natural assets of our region (food and forests), as well as independent ecotourism and any other industry which will provide career-path jobs.
Local business owners which are a part of RRGU will testify that it is currently difficult to keep employees year-round and as a consequence many business are forced to close due to a lack of labor. If local well-established businesses have difficulties keeping full-time employees during winter months then our worry is that the 300+ jobs which RRED promises with their development will actually NOT GO TO LOCALS but will go largely to tourists who are using H1 work visas. Remember, the expressed intent behind this development was “to address the rapid economic decline in Kentucky’s eastern coalfields,” but how is this replacing coal jobs when local residents don’t even receive the funds?
RRED’s planning documents mention that “any private developer investing millions of dollars and creating hundreds of jobs [will want assurances from local authorities that any other developments that follow will complement the proposed high-quality resort and their new RRG brand]. A land-use plan and reasonable restrictions within a certain radius of the anchor resort will be necessary to attract developers and capital investment.”
They don’t want zoning to limit their development, but after they’ve built their resort they want to enact zoning to protect against… what? Why don’t they support zoning before putting in the resort?
This planned course of action could both limit further business development and drive out existing businesses by limiting their ability to grow and adapt over time. An area within a 10-mile radius of the development site has been mentioned as might fall into this zone.
This isn’t even built, but they want legal assurances they won’t have competition? Is this resort actually viable on its own without a massive local-taxpayer-funded support system?
Should one entity own the RRG “brand?” One part of the RFP and following Stantec study was to establish a unified “The Gorge” brand, and the Stantec study even provided a logo – commissioned without public input – and seemingly expects that every business in the area adopt this logo they have designed. But does this mean RRED or the proposed development investors will “own” that mark and its associated trademark and copyright? Would they charge licensing fees to local businesses to use this design?
When RRED was asked about the specifics of this in the October meeting but declined to provide any explanation. This is just another sign of commercialized “top-down” approach the entire project has employed. Any projects which truly seek to enhance such a truly treasured gem as the Red River Gorge should absolute seek out a huge abundance of public input at every point in the process, and that is just not what we have seen with this project so far.
We will only contact you with important reasons and timely information, and will never sell your data.