Mounting concerns at the Bass Lake Beach and Campground have the Starke County Park Board ready to hire a park superintendent for all of its properties. Board Member Kathy Norem told the rest of the park board Tuesday that beach and campground manager Larry Clarich isn’t doing the job she’d hoped he’d do.
“I have no confidence in what he is doing out there,” she said. “I think he’s stirring up half the trouble with these campers by whispering and making insinuations and innuendos, and I don’t appreciate it.”
County officials say Clarich failed to hand over several thousand dollars of revenues by the county’s deadline. Clarich has argued that the money belongs to Callahan Development, LLC, since it still rented the property when it was collected, an idea that Norem called “baloney.” Now, she’s asking all the campers to send the county copies of their canceled checks, to try to straighten it out.
“I want to see what the date was on the checks that they had written,” Norem said. “I want to see who they wrote them to. Was it Larry Clarich or was it Callahan, LLC? But I want copies of those because I’m probably going to be visiting the prosecutor with them.”
Norem was also concerned that the campers don’t actually have a written lease, and campers complained about a lack of consistency with the rules. In the end, the park board voted to require all the campers to sign the lease agreement recommended by the county’s insurance carrier, with the added stipulation that no subleasing be allowed, after one of the campsites apparently showed up on Vrbo. “That is not right,” Norem said. “She’s charging $200 a night to let people come in there, and we’re charging $2,200 a season or whatever it is. That is ridiculous.”
As for Clarich, Norem made her frustration clear, at one point saying he should be “run out of town on a rail.” “I’m not voting for you coming back again,” she told him. “If we had a vote today, which I don’t know that this park board would go along with it, I’d fire you today. If you had worked for me in any of my previous positions, you would not have lasted this long. You wouldn’t have lasted a day. I’d have had you escorted out of the place quickly.”
Norem plans to take the park board’s request to proceed with a superintendent hire to the county council Monday.
