After SpaceX announcement, expect surge of RV parks to pop up in the next year

Anticipating a surge of workers next year because of the construction of SpaceX in South Vermilion Parish, the Police Jury has started planning for the arrival of hundreds of workers and their campers, who may call the parish home for two to three years or more.
On Tuesday, Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to make the annoucement that SpaceX will be building a billion-dollar facility in South Vermilion Parish, near the Gulf of Mexico. He will be in Abbeville to make that annoucement.
A majority of the construction workers who will be building SpaceX will live in the parish or in Acadiana. Many of the same workers are the ones who built the facility in Brownsvile, Texas or LNG plants south of Lake Charles.
Near Brownsville, it is not uncommon to see 400 traveling campers parked on a 20-plus-acre strip of land. Living in the campers are workers who are helping to build SpaceX and an LNG plant at the port of Brownsville.
RV parks around the LNG plants in Cameron Parish charge around $800 per lot per month.
Abbeville already has an established RV Park. Abbeville RV Park, privately run, has room for 50 campers and charges around $500 a month for a lot. The city allows individuals who are temporarily working in the parish to reside in the park.
On the other hand, the parish has no ordinances specifying where an RV park may be established or the maximum number of campers permitted per acre.
Additionally, there are no regulations outlining the placement of RV parks or the allowable camper density in the parish.
Police Jury Vice President Chad Lege, whose district is in the Esther-Intracoastal City area, raised the issue of the future of RV parks.
“ I asked for us (police jury) to look at what Cameron Parish has done,” said Lege. “Cameron has built some huge RV parks. I want to make sure we are looking at and learning from the mistakes and conflicts that Cameron Parish dealt with.”
The police jury is collecting ordinances from other parishes and from Texas that deal with RV parks. Because of the new construction that is about to take place in the year with SpaceX, Lege predicts RV parks will begin being built south and north of Abbeville and Kaplan.
“I predict you are going to see a lot more in the south of the parish, but there will be some north of Abbeville,” Lege said. “We want to have something in place in case one is built next to neighborhoods. Should a fence be built between the park and the neighborhood? Those are the things we need to put in place before they are built.”