Three more statewide organizations, the Hoosier Environmental Council, Hoosier Chapter Sierra Club and Citizens Action Coalition, announced today that they have taken a position against an Indiana Department of Natural Resources proposal to build a new banquet and conference facility on the beach at the Indiana Dunes State Park. Instead, the groups support a prior compromise, renovating the existing park pavilion, which would have limited adverse impacts to the park, its visitors, and the natural resources it protects.

The DNR signed a contract with Pavilion Partners LLC in February to rehabilitate the iconic old park pavilion building built in 1930, to build a family comfort center on the west side of the pavilion, and a new banquet hall on the east side. The expanded pavilion and banquet center will harm the park’s beach environment by contributing more light pollution at night, creating an attractive, even deadly, nuisance for birds given the banquet hall’s huge glass windows, and setting the stage for more beach front development in the form of a hotel and marina as described in the developer’s original proposal as possible future projects at the site.

The groups say the DNR and the Partners have been touting the project as a pavilion re-use project but omitted telling the public that the selected proposal included a new building being built next to the old one.

“This was intentionally misleading on their part to keep the public out of the process after their experience in 2006,” said Bowden Quinn, chapter director of the Sierra Club’s Hoosier Chapter, referring to a battle between the locals and the DNR to build a hotel in the same general area. That proposal was withdrawn, and a compromise resulted which would have allowed only renovation of the existing pavilion.

“Here is yet another conversion of public land to benefit private development interests,” said Tim Maloney, senior policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council. “Dunes State Park and its beach are public lands and held in trust for the people of Indiana. With this project the developers will retain the majority of profits from the project, while paying a very cheap lease payment, no more than a family would pay for a four bedroom home, for as long as 65 years.”

Citizens Action Coalition executive director Kerwin Olson was critical of the lack of transparency on the plan. “The DNR and the developers have been negotiating this deal since 2012,” he said. “The public should have been advised then about the new building.” Olson said the plans were just made public in February.

“The fact that the DNR would even consider building a new banquet hall with huge windows on the beach there shows how poorly thought out this was,” said Maloney. “The DNR just built a beautiful bird observation platform at the park, and now they are adding a new structure that may become a major bird hazard.” The Lake Michigan shoreline is critically important to millions of migratory birds, which use the shoreline as an important resting area.

“The paltry amount of money the DNR will get from putting a private banquet hall on the most desirable real estate on Lake Michigan in Indiana amounts to a give-away of public land,” added Quinn. “We strongly object to DNR’s secrecy, lack of transparency and failure to get adequate public participation, which are vital to any proposal to increase human impacts on our state’s precious natural areas.”

The organizations are encouraging letters, emails, and phone calls to Governor Pence to cancel this project. Contact information can be found at http://in.gov/gov/2333.htm