Uncasville - If Camp Tadma does not show a "healthy improvement" in attendance in 2010, all activities at the Bozrah Boy Scout campground will be suspended indefinitely, the scout executive of the Connecticut Rivers Council said during a public meeting at St. Bernard School in Montville Tuesday.

"We have poured almost one million dollars into the site over the last five years and our participation has cut in half over that time," said Henry Pokorny, the top official at the Connecticut Rivers Council, which is based in East Hartford and covers most of the state. "How long can we justify spending all that money yet still keeping up our other services."

The announcement was met with grumbling and disappointment from the audience, composed mainly of scouts and scout leaders.

"We all agree that we need to improve our numbers at Camp Tadma, but the problem is that we have one year to improve it," David Terry, a scout leader from East Hampton, said. "An improvement from 400 to 800 in one year is almost impossible."

The site has seen its participation dwindle from 750 to 450 over the last five years, Pokorny said. To keep it operational for next year, that number would have to jump to at least 600, he said, and must hit at least 800 eventually to stay viable in the long term.

Camp Tadma, one of four camps under the council, is geared primarily for younger children in Cub Scouts and Webelos. Kids from several towns in New London County, such as Salem, East Lyme, Waterford and New London, use the site for both day and overnight camping.

"The problem with regionalizing and sending kids to other camp grounds is that Camp Tadma is really the only good place for younger children," Jeff Clark, another East Hampton scout leader, said. "The other sites are meant for older kids, Boy Scouts, and they're much, much bigger than Tadma and are just not really meant for younger children."

If Camp Tadma is closed, campers will likely be relocated to Webster Scout Reservation in Ashford. Ashford is much farther away than Bozrah for most southeastern Connecticut residents, said Salem scout leader Ed Chmielewski, and the move will only hurt participation more.

"Nobody is going to send their 8-year-old an hour away to camp," he said. "They gave us no time to fix the problem and are setting (Camp Tadma) up to fail."

Pokorny did announce that the Connecticut Rivers Council will hire a marketing coordinator to advertise all the camps, mainly through social networking Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. Pokorny also pushed the scout leaders to sell the camps to their scouts and encouraged them to work with the council, not against it.

"We can get into a big competition and one side will go home angry," he said. "If we do that, we both lose. We need to work together and solve this problem."

If Camp Tadma is shut down, it will likely be sold, according to Clark.

"They are setting these properties up to make them useless so they can sell them and make some quick money," Chmielewski said. "Those properties were donated by families to the Boy Scouts, and for them to sell them is just not right."

In 2004, Camp Wakenah, a similar campground in Salem, was sold by the Boy Scouts for $750,000. All camp activities in Wakenah at the time were moved to Tadma.