WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Crossroads Church bought its first acres of rolling woodlands and farmland in Clermont County in 2016 to create a primitive campsite where visitors could experience God in a unique way.
The Oakley-based megachurch purchased adjoining land for $6.4 million in 2024 and 2025, and it now owns 831 acres, according to the county auditor’s office. That acreage is more than double the size of Kings Island amusement park.
The popularity of this camp, where healing miracles reportedly occurred, has pushed against the realities of a rural township facing a budget crisis.
“Our township road is not made for that much traffic,” Washington Township Board of Trustees Chair Dennis Cooper said, referring to Burns Road which leads to the Crossroads Base Camp. “It’s maybe not so much the weekend traffic, but they have a lot of bigger vehicles, box trucks and port-o-lets, that come in. Food trucks, they bring in a lot of material up there.”
Crossroads now plans to build an 850-foot-long earthen dam to create a 22-acre man-made lake, a project application filed with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency states.
The church's website states it also has room for an amphitheater, wide-open spaces to hosts thousands more people, music festivals for young adults, and a national marketing effort to attract more visitors.
WATCH: Crossroads Church's land buy brings traffic and tax revenue concerns to township
Many Crossroads camps already draw enough visitors to outnumber the roughly 2,500 residents of Washington Township, and with several popular weekend camps coming this fall, officials are concerned about road deterioration.
Cooper also worried about the township’s financial crisis, the loss of property tax revenue, and a shrinking emergency services department. A safety services levy will be on the ballot this fall, he said.
“They devalued Zimmer and then they shut it completely down which took away a huge tax base for us,” Cooper said.
Texas-based Vistra Corp. closed the William H. Zimmer Power Station in 2022. Two years later, Crossroads began buying more land here. Because churches are tax-exempt, the township lost more revenue.
“Then we’ve had Crossroads come out and purchase around 900 acres of property, which we’re no longer getting tax money on,” Cooper said. “So, we’ve had a double whammy when it comes to incoming property tax. It’s been a challenge.”
Crossroads draws thousands of visitors to its campsite on the seven or eight weekends it hosts retreats each year: Man Camp, Woman Camp, Family Camp, Couples Camp, Father-Son Camp, Mother-Daughter Camp, Vet Camp and a fall revival which has a questionable return in 2026.
They sleep in tents and cook meals over campfires. There is usually live music, a water slide into a pond, quiet hiking, reflection, and a prayer tent that has been credited with miracles. Couples on the verge of separation have reunited and burned their divorce papers in campfires. A woman was cured of hearing loss, stunning her doctors, Crossroads Public Relations Director Erin Caproni said.
Crossroads held its first Man Camp in 2015 on a borrowed farm. Since then, the popularity of these off-the-grid retreats have grown to 84 events, with more than 49,000 campers and over 2,000 baptisms, according to post on the church’s website from last year.
“Now we must focus on adding new features and better experiences to reach tens of thousands more people … We’re building a destination for people from all over the country to come and experience God in a profound and unique way,” a 2025 post on Crossroad’s website sates. It touted room to create “America’s Camp Revival Land,” and for all current camps to grow “10X.”
Cooper said he didn’t know the expansion plan contained a national marketing effort, and the scope of it concerned him.
“They’re public roads, but our citizens need to know when these things are going to happen and how it’s going to affect them,” Cooper said. “The other concern is how much more property are they going to buy. And they’re offering such an exorbitant price for it, I can’t blame people for selling.”
The WCPO 9 I-Team took Cooper’s concerns to Caproni, who said the church has no plans to buy more land, and any potential expansion plans would consider infrastructure such as roads.
“We’re really just dreaming big about what God is going to be able to do across the board at Crossroads,” Caproni said. “I think some of the things that are on our website, they are examples of what that could be. None of that is set in stone.”
Crossroads launched an exhaustive search for a campsite. It settled on Washington Township after reviewing sites across Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana that were within an hour of the airport and its headquarters in Oakley, according to Caproni and Ohio EPA documents.
“Our leadership, as they were exploring, just felt like God was calling us to that space,” Caproni said. “There have been stories about whether or not the Underground Railroad may have crossed over that site, which feels like there were people experiencing freedom long before we were there.”
The church tries to be a good neighbor and become part of every community where it has a presence, Caproni said.
“Obviously, as a church, we know that we have tax-exempt status and we were aware of that when we were purchasing the property,” Caproni said. “So, we actually ran numbers to have an estimate of what our property taxes would be if we were paying them … and in Washington Township our annual property tax would fund them about $3,000 dollars a year.”
Caproni said the church invests “a good amount of money in that area that probably exceeds that most years.”
The church contributed $5,450 to repair a storm siren in the village of Neville, roughly a mile from the camp entrance. It contracts with Washington Township’s EMS department to be on site during camp weekends. And its Base Camp director cuts grass at neighboring parks.
A slew of Crossroads volunteers came to Neville last year, and again this May, to clean up an overgrown playground and park, by mulching, removing trees, and putting up new basketball and volleyball nets.
“It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a lot of effort,” Neville Mayor Rob Gastrich said. “They’re good neighbors, they help us out sometimes; and I can’t complain too much.”
Most of the 100 Neville residents live far enough from the camp entrance to not be bothered by weekend traffic, Gastrich said. “So we might get a different perspective than Dennis (Cooper of Washington Township) gets.”
There was only one traffic problem that Gastrich could remember. It occurred on a revival weekend in fall 2024, which reportedly drew 8,000, clogging highways and prompting authorities to threaten to shut it down, Crossroad’s website states.
“They had traffic backed up all the way down U.S. 52, they had to get cops down here,” Gastrich said, noting that his neighbor had to park her car and walk up Neville-Penn Schoolhouse Road to get home because traffic was so backed up. “But they fixed that, so it hasn’t been that bad of a problem again."
Crossroads now hires Clermont County Sheriff’s deputies to help with traffic on camp weekends. It also made road improvements at camp.
“We created ingress and egress to help reduce traffic flow so that it’s more on our land and less interacting with other people on those weekends,” Caproni said. “We do our best to contract with local companies to come in and do things whether it’s putting down gravel or working on a fence.”
But the property tax remained a sticking point for Cooper, who was unsure exactly how much the township was losing each year because of Crossroads tax-exempt status.
“They’re not just buying land. There’s prestige homes on these barns, there’s a barndominium on one of them, right at the end of Burns Road,” Cooper said.
Chris Mehlman, deputy Clermont County auditor, said the township missed $934 per year in revenue on the Crossroads parcels, based on the last year taxes were paid.
“Please keep in mind that although the value is exempt the entities are only losing the inside millage. The voted levies are adjusted (effective rates) to ensure that the levies are collecting what was intended and approved by the taxpayers,” Mehlman wrote. “So, although taxes may not be paid due to the exemption, the rest of the tax base picks up the difference so that voted levies still collect what was originally approved.”
That means Crossroad’s share of all voted levies was paid by other taxpayers, Mehlman confirmed.
As for the local roads, the Clermont County engineer’s office conducted a traffic study last fall on Neville-Penn Schoolhouse Road, which is the primary route visitors use to reach the camp entrance approximately a mile from the U.S. 52 intersection.
On a typical weekend, 101 vehicles travel that road each day. During camp weekends, road traffic jumped to 1,344 per day, Deputy County Engineer Lyle Bloom said.
The engineer's office is planning to repair a landslide on Neville-Penn Schoolhouse Road in 2027, closing the road for a four-to-six-week construction project. The county and Ohio Public Works Commission are sharing the $247,080 cost, with the county's share at 21 percent, Bloom said.
“We have no reason to believe it is due to the heavy trucks and increased traffic. Due to our topography, landslide / slips are very common throughout the county and occur on many of the township and county roads,” Bloom wrote in an email to WCPO.
The closure of Neville-Penn Schoolhouse Road worried Cooper, because he said camp traffic would be re-routed onto more township roads.
“That’s going to be a real big issue,” Cooper said.
He’d like Crossroads to take over the maintenance of Burns Road and make a financial contribution to the upkeep of township roads.
“I think we’re open to conversation and continuing conversation. I don’t think anyone has said we’re not willing to help,” Caproni said. “I think we need some plans on what that’s going to look like.”
Cooper, who lives next to the camp on Neville-Penn Schoolhouse Road and spoke highly of its Base Camp director and others there, said he’s had trouble getting access to higher-level leadership at Crossroads, in order to relay his concerns.
For example, Cooper said he asked Crossroads to help pay for the township’s annual contract with the Clermont County Sheriff in 2024, which he estimated would be $90,000 per year going forward, to provide deputies to the area.
“And the answer was no,” Cooper said.
“I'm sorry to hear about the troubles the township is going through right now. In talking to leadership this week, at this time Crossroads is not able to assist financially. If there's anything else we can do please do not hesitate to reach out,” Season Huff, Crossroads director of finance and operations wrote in a May 5, 2024, email to Cooper.
Cooper said the township is in a very challenging financial situation.
In recent years, its EMS department has shrunk from as many as 10 full-time employees, down to three. The township can’t afford to replace its administrator who just retired, so Cooper is taking on that role in addition to his trustee duties. He also approached the county about taking over the maintenance of township parks.
“I think as an organization we do our best to balance our operational expenses and what we can send out to the community to help. And so, I think if there was a time that there was a ‘no’ answer. It was likely because of that,” Caproni said.
Crossroads carries very little cash on hand, so when it comes to big asks that weren’t planned for, “we kind of have to pivot around,” Caproni said.
“We do ministry with the philosophy that we don't save for a rainy day because it's raining now. The money that comes in at Crossroads is immediately earmarked to do ministry and spent for those purposes,” Caproni wrote in an email to WCPO.
But she also said, “I’d love for Dennis to reach out again and I’m sure we could have a really healthy conversation.”
