Fish Lake feud: Spokane County buys last portion of rival private resort at Fish Lake. They battled each other in court multiple times.

The family that ran a former private resort and once battled Spokane County over operations of a public park at Fish Lake is selling the last of its adjacent property for park expansion.

The Spokane County Commissioners unanimously approved the purchase of an 8-acre property on the Cheney-area lake’s northeast end last week from the Myers Living Trust and trust representative Brian Myers. With a price tag of nearly $610,000, the county’s purchase will bring the park’s total size to just shy of 76 acres.

Commissioner Al French, who represents the West Plains, said he hopes to see improvements to the park similar to those at Bear Lake and Liberty Lake county parks, which received extensive renovations last summer. He said the county is still finalizing plans for the 8 acres and upgrades to the rest of the park.

“It’s going to be a much more family-friendly facility for the public than it has been in the past, or has been even today,” French said. “I’m excited about where it’s going, and I’ve had multiple meetings with property owners out there that are, likewise, excited about the improvements.”

Myers declined to be interviewed through his attorney.

French said he’s also looking forward to closing the book on the decadeslong back and forth between the property’s owners and Spokane County.

The parcel is the last remaining vestige of the Myers Park Resort that was still owned by the Myers family. The resort operated on the lake’s northeast bank from 1962 to 1995, although a land purchase from Spokane County in the early ’90s left the operation with only its recreational vehicle park and eatery, DJ’s Restaurant & Lounge. The restaurant’s rusted sign and decrepit exterior have greeted visitors to the park for years.

In 1962, the late Tom Myers purchased Farrington Park, a lakeside resort he spent the next few years re-establishing as his own. To cater to the picnic and swimming crowds, Myers purchased a dozen new rowboats, established a tackle shop and lunch prep spot, and fixed up the resort’s large camping site. He also expanded the swimming area on the lakefront property and hauled in truckloads of sand, according to a 1965 article in The Spokesman-Review.

Spokane County’s presence in the area began just a few years after Myers moved in, when the county’s governing board bought 56 acres of lakefront property, including around 45 acres of lake itself, from a pair of former resort operators.

Ralph Umbreit, chair of the Spokane County Commissioners at the time, said the purchase was necessary to ensure public access to the site well into the future. Then-parks director Roy Gunderson echoed Umbreit’s sentiment, pointing to recent sales of similar resorts to private developers elsewhere in the county, like around Liberty Lake, as an example.

“The same thing is happening everywhere,” Gunderson told The Spokesman-Review in 1965. “The public will be excluded if something is not done – and we believe it should be done locally rather than on a state or federal basis.”

The county ran into challenges with its swath of land almost immediately. Buildings and structures repeatedly sunk into a peat bog despite the county’s efforts to infill, and seasonal flooding led to the park’s repeated closure. Entire summers would go by without a single open weekend for visitors to enjoy the space.

There were also several challenges from Myers, who accused the county of going into “competition with private enterprise.” He decried plans to set a lower lake level to address the flooding, went to state agencies to oppose efforts to draw water for county facilities in the park and ran a chain across the county’s boat launch when it opened in the late ’70s, according to newspaper archives.

Myers took his ongoing dispute with the county to court in 1977, filing a lawsuit that alleged the county park had become a nuisance property and must be shut down. Garbage was allowed to accumulate, dogs were roaming at large and visitors to the park were engaging in “various obnoxious, offensive, abusive and annoying activities,” the lawsuit alleged.

Those activities included harassing the resort owners and their employees, as well as trespassing onto the property to make use of diving boards, boats and swim decks, according to newspaper archives. Spokane County settled the lawsuit for $6,000 in 1980, two years after the park closed over budgetary constraints.

Michael Myers, who managed the property after his father retired, took up his parents’ charge as the county worked to reopen the property throughout the ’80s. He successfully advocated for the Department of Ecology to retract the county’s permits for the park’s sewage system, won a legal challenge to the county’s attempts to require boat registration and opposed efforts to infill the entity’s beachfront area.

A change of heart came about in the early ’90s, when Michael Myers sold the resort’s lakefront property and water rights to the county for $295,000. He told The Spokesman-Review that his father, Tom Myers, was ready to reduce his activities and preserve public access to the lake.

“We could have got more money from California, there’s no question about that, but this lake has been open to the public since 1907,” Michael Myers said. “It’s a good little lake, it really is.”

The Myerses continued to operate an RV park and DJ’s up until 1995, when the Spokane County Health District ordered the closure of a sewage system serving both because it was installed illegally. Tom Myers built the system, which included a damned ravine serving as a holding pond, in 1968. The ravine was leaking bacteria-rich waste into the surrounding area.

In 1996, Spokane County launched a volunteer-led effort to clean up the park after decades of allowing it to fall into disrepair. The beaches of the ’60s had become impromptu parking lots, structures were shuttered, and beer cans and bottles littered the trails.

The Spokane County Commissioners at the time took note of the West Plains community’s desire for an enjoyable recreation area and invested $250,000 to improve the park by the summer of 1999. The park remains a popular destination for West Plains residents, as it is the only county park in the area.

French said he looks forward to seeing how the county can continue to invest in the space, as part of an effort to serve residents no matter where they are in Spokane County.

“If you look at the county map, you’ve got Liberty Lake, Bear Lake and Fish Lake,” French said. “We’ll have a lake with family improvements in every corner of the county, and in an ideal situation, that’s the way it should be, so that everybody’s got access to the same kind of recreational opportunities.”