EDITORIAL: Campsite figures lowered

Parks officials are a little embarrassed by the figures they released last week projecting 100,000 additional weekend visitors to Crystal Cove State Park in 2010, when the new El Moro Campground will open.

Oops, that figure should have been described as an annual one, Crystal Cove State Park Supt. Ken Kramer now says.

The press statement was written in Sacramento, and something got lost in the translation to Orange County, apparently.

The official projected weekend number of additional tourists to the area from the new overnight campground is now down to 2,000.

El Moro will have 60 overnight campsites, with two parking spaces each, and 200 day-use parking spaces, for a grand total of 320 parking spots.

Crystal Cove State Park now sees about 1 million visitors annually, and the parks department expects an additional 250,000 when the El Moro campground facility is in operation, Kramer said.

An extra quarter-million visitors per year is significant and should translate into more folks eating at local restaurants and shopping in Laguna Beach, without overburdening local streets, Kramer believes.

“There will be less intensity from the campground than there was from the [El Morro] mobile home park, which had 294 homes,” Kramer tells us. “It will not overrun the area.”

The size of the campground has been a hot topic for some years.

Laguna Beach City Councilwoman Toni Iseman says when she was on the California Coastal Commission she fought to keep the RV component of the new campground at 50% of the total campground size in order to put a cap on the amount of large vehicles allowed. She believes that number will be a comfortable fit in the area.

We break the numbers down this way: If there are 250,000 more people visiting Crystal Cove State Park in a year, there will be about 4,800 more people throughout the week, which breaks down to an average of 685 additional visitors per day. This should ease the fears of some folks who were aghast at the thought of hundreds of thousands more people driving on local roads.