Park's Beach Club to reopen Friday

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July 23, 2007

By Jane Smith The Meadville Tribune Mon Jul 23, 2007, 11:36 PM EDT

07/24/07 —

CONNEAUT LAKE — Conneaut Lake Park’s Beach Club and Down Under bars will reopen Friday, a week ahead of plans announced last week.

Although all the final details haven’t yet been worked out,

American Resort Inc., with Jeff Mona as president, has been named to manage the lakefront facility. The announcement was made

Monday by Ralph Lee, spokesman for the Trustees of Conneaut Lake Park.

Lee said the opening will include entertainment, food and beverages.

The park — and all its properties except Camperland — didn’t open this year because of financial problems. When former court-appointed overseer LeRoy Stearns announced the park’s closing, Conneaut Lake businessman Gregory Sutterlin began a public fund-raising campaign. Although Sutterlin hoped to raise enough to open all of the park, the effort produced $60,000, which was deemed enough to open the Beach Club and possibly Hotel Conneaut.

The Beach Club first opened in the mid-1930s. One claim to its historical fame is that 18-year-old Doris Day sang there with the Bob Crosby Orchestra in the 1940s.

The Down Under is in the same building, located below the boardwalk-level Beach Club, in an area that was once a bath house for visitors to the beach. In recent years, the Down Under also has become a popular entertainment spot.

In addition to announcing the upcoming opening of the two clubs, Lee said the board approved refunding $7,000 in deposits made for weddings that were to have been held at the park’s Hotel Conneaut this summer.

“A wedding is so important to a family,” Lee said, noting that board members made the reimbursement a priority.

The 15-member board was appointed a little more than four weeks ago. The members accepted “responsibility for a closed-up amusement park with more than $2 million in debts, decades of deferred maintenance, a stack of unpaid utility bills and a bank account balance of a few hundred dollars,” Lee said.

“And the reality is this: Even a closed-up amusement park costs considerable sums of money to maintain. Many years of litigation and a series of questionable business decisions maneuvered Conneaut Lake Park into its present precarious state,” he said.

He said the board is asking that the public allow it “some time to address the enormous burden of bringing the park back on its feet.”

Also at Monday’s meeting, the board created a subcommittee to begin long-range planning “to map out a strategy to make the park solvent,” Lee said. “This planning for the park’s future is critical to ensure its survival into the future.”

In addition, the board is working with the Crawford County Planning Commission in the development of a municipal-based Comprehensive Land Use Plan for CLP with an emphasis on zoning.

“The line between Sadsbury and Summit Townships falls directly down the center of the park. By creating a CLP planning zone made up of members of Sadsbury Township, Summit Township and Conneaut Lake Borough, any future development by investors will be less prohibitive. Additionally, this will help foster the ability to receive any economically structured state grants,” Lee added.

Jane Smith can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at jsmith@meadvilletribune.com.

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