Not speculators.
Operators.
In most zoning fights, the applicant is a limited partnership from three states away that nobody can find and nobody will ever see again. That is not the situation here. Mike and Tiffanie Weaver run businesses in northeast Indiana that you can drive to this afternoon and judge for yourself.
Zoomers RV — Wabash, Indiana
Mike Weaver started Zoomers RV in Wabash with a single used travel trailer. It now runs three locations across Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, carries 500+ RVs in stock, and handles sales, financing, parts, service, and nationwide delivery out of a headquarters on E. State Road 524 in Wabash. Weaver has been preparing to open what the company describes as the largest RV service facility in Indiana.
Whatever else is true about this proposal, the applicant is not new to the RV business. He has spent his career in it, in Indiana, under his own name.
Source: Zoomers RV — About Us
CoCoJo’s RV Campground — Lagro, Wabash County
This is the one that matters most, because it’s the same thing Sunbirds proposes to be.
CoCoJo’s sits near Salamonie Lake, about a mile and a half from Salamonie State Park and the Dora-New Holland boat ramp. It was formerly Bozarth’s Country Store and Campground; the Weavers took it over and built it into a 311-site seasonal community operated under Zoomers RV Resort, LLC, with Tiffanie Weaver handling reservations.
What’s on the property now: two pools, a splash pad, basketball, volleyball and sand courts, a fishing pond with a beach, a Ninja Warrior course, an arcade, a camp store, live music, and a full-service restaurant and bar. Visit Wabash County, the county’s tourism bureau, features it as “an entertaining stay.”
Their stated mission, in their own words:
“Committed to Strengthening Families by Creating Memories that Matter.”
— CoCoJo’s RV Campground
You do not have to take anyone’s word for how the Weavers run a seasonal community. It’s about an hour’s drive from Fort Wayne. Go look at it, talk to the people camped there, and form your own opinion — that is a better basis for a letter to the Board than anything on this website or the one opposing us.
Sources: CoCoJo’s RV Campground · Visit Wabash County
MochaShine — downtown Wabash
Mike and Tiffanie Weaver also opened MochaShine, an express car wash and café at 793 S. Wabash Street, with a second location planned in Peru. It runs on an idea that tells you something about how they think about a business: the soap and wax are coffee-scented, and every wash comes with a free “Smile” — a coffee, a soda, a scoop of ice cream, a donut, or a dog wash. They brought in Jeremy and Rachel Landis of J&R Detailing as operations managers.
It is a car wash. We’re not going to pretend it’s a civic institution. But it is one more instance of the same pattern: buy something in a small Indiana town, invest in it, and try to make it a place people enjoy going.
Source: Wabash County’s News-Journal
Investing in the county they live in
Tiffanie Weaver is a Wabash native. When Wabash County leaders built a fellowship program aimed at drawing young professionals to a county losing population, the Weavers backed it — Zoomers provided housing for the fellows. Tiffanie told the Journal Gazette she thought exposing more young adults to the county could help reverse its decline.
That is a small thing in the scheme of a zoning case. We mention it because the opposition’s framing treats the applicant as an extractive outsider, and the record doesn’t support that framing. These are people who have spent years putting money into small northeast Indiana towns.
Source: The Journal Gazette
A family business, including this one
The letter the Weavers sent to neighbors said Sunbirds would be run by the family directly — Mike, Tiffanie, and their five children. That is worth weighing when you consider who you’d be dealing with if you had a complaint about noise, lights, or a burned-out streetlamp at two in the morning.
The alternative pattern is familiar: an LLC files, sells the entitlement, and the eventual operator is a regional management company reachable only through a web form. Whatever your view of this project, that is not what’s being proposed here.
Source: WANE 15
On transparency
Before filing anything, the Weavers mailed nearby property owners a letter describing the plan, said they wanted to bring “open communication and transparency” to Yoder Road, and invited neighbors to meet them in person at Roanoke Baptist Church. About 30 people came, most of them opposed, and Weaver has since gone on the record with local media defending the proposal rather than staying quiet behind an attorney.
Some neighbors felt two days’ notice before a holiday week was not enough time to prepare, and that’s a fair criticism — a first meeting scheduled that tightly reads as a box being checked. The relevant point is that the meeting happened at all, before any filing, which is more than most applicants do.
Neighbors are entitled to hold him to that. If you have questions about the project, the productive move is to ask him directly and ask the Board to condition any approval on real answers — which is exactly what we think should happen.
Source: Woodall’s Campground Magazine
A note on fairness. A track record cuts both ways, and a full accounting of any operator includes the regulatory record along with the business record. We’re working through the environmental enforcement history the opposition has compiled on CoCoJo’s and will publish our reading of it here rather than pretend it doesn’t exist. If we get any of that wrong, tell us.
Judge it yourself, then write.
Drive to Lagro. Look at what a Weaver seasonal community actually looks like. Then tell the Board what you saw.