Coyote Blog

I discussed the shutdown and its effects on the parks my company operates here (spoiler:  all are still open).  Shawn Regan of PERC has a good article in the National Review on the same subject:

....under new shutdown guidelines established by the Trump administration, our parks have been rightfully spared from serving as pawns in Washington’s partisan budget battles as they did in the past.

Under a contingency plan created by the administration, park officials are allowed to keep sites accessible to visitors during the shutdown with skeletal staffs, rather than being forced to close them as was the case during the 2013 government shutdown presided over by President Obama. That means many important visitor activities and park operations — from snow-coach rides in Yellowstone run by private concessionaires to guided battlefield tours of Gettysburg — can continue yielding economic benefits for the surrounding communities. This week, the National Park Service also announced it will begin tapping unspent visitor-fee revenues to bolster operations at some parks.

These new plans are attracting criticism in the familiar anything-Trump-does-must-be-bad vein. Theresa Pierno of the National Parks Conservation Association slammed the administration’s decision to keep parks open, calling it “unrealistic and dangerous,” even though the NPCA repeatedly called for parks to be reopened during the 2013 shutdown. Representative Raúl Grijalva, the new Democratic chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, pledged to hold hearingson the administration’s decision to support park operations with fee revenues....

The Trump administration’s approach is sensible. Why unnecessarily ruin visitors’ plans or jeopardize the millions of dollars in revenue that local communities receive from park visitation? If visitation begins to pose significant health or safety concerns, the contingency plan gives park superintendents the option to close areas or shut down parks entirely, as some parks have already done.

He goes on to make the very logical point that the vast majority of BLM lands and US Forest Service lands -- whose acreage dwarfs that under management by the National Park Service -- mostly all remain open in every shutdown.  The large amounts of government staffing on NPS lands are needed to handle large visitor concentrations in small areas, something that really is not an issue in most parks in January.

Folks who have been hunting for pictures of overflowing trash cans to paint the current opening of parks as a bad idea could find just as many in the summertime on government lands when the government is not shut down.  Remember, for all the love folks want to throw at the National Park Service at these times, it is an agency that has allowed many of its parks to fall apart, with perhaps $20 billion in deferred maintenance and very little new investment in the modern infrastructure visitors are demanding.  And it has a labor model that is well suited to counting wolves but poorly suited to efficiently cleaning bathrooms and emptying trash cans even when the government is open.  This shutdown is the least of the problems faced by public recreation lands.

I think people get confused about the purpose of the government shutdown.  It is not a punishment, or a timeout, meted out by the law when Congress can't agree on a budget.  It is a mechanical (and logical) requirement that spending on certain activities stop when that spending is no longer legally authorized.  The media acts like it is supposed to be painful, and that Trump is somehow breaking the rules by making it less so.  I often criticize this President, but this is one area Trump should be applauded.  I think the wall funding issue is a dumb reason to go into budget gridlock, particularly when he had 2 years of Republican Congresses to get this done, but given the fact of the shutdown he should be applauded for attempting to reduce its impact on ordinary Americans.  President Obama, for all his reputation of caring and hope, was to my mind overly callous in explicitly trying to make the shutdown more painful for average people.

Several readers have been nice enough to write me and ask how my business is doing during the government shutdown.  As background, my company privately operates public recreation areas, mostly campgrounds, under concession contract.  We manage public lands for many different government agencies, but many of the campgrounds we run are in the Forest Service.  Typically the Forest Service (and National Park Service) must close in this and most other shutdowns.  In fact, public parks are often a significant pawn in budget battles, so much so the term "closing the Washington Monument" has become shorthand for using popular public facilities as a leverage point in spending fights (the fact that politicians always threaten to close the MOST popular public services when money is tight rather than the most useless is exhibit A in why we shouldn't trust our money to Congress).

But all the Federal facilities we operate are still open right now through the government shutdown.  The reason for this is that our company does not receive a dime from the government -- all the money goes the other way.  We operate the facilities essentially under a (very restrictive) lease.  We collect visitor use fees and then pay a bid percentage of those fees back to the Feds as our rent -- this is a huge advantage to the government as before our management they typically lost money even after collected visitor fees and now they are gaining money**.  Since the government does not have to fund these locations, and since their daily operation requires no federal employees, the parks we operate are typically not closed during government shutdowns.

Long-time readers will be familiar with one exception -- in 2013 during the Obama Administration we were forced to close during a Federal shutdown.  Originally, the agencies we work with (particularly the US Forest Service which is part of the Department of Agriculture) gave us the usual guidance, that we were to remain open.  Then, suddenly, our company and those like it were told to shut down.  When I and my trade group attempted to protest the decision with whatever official in the agency made the decision, we were told it came from "above the Department of Agriculture," which narrows the field of possible decision-makers pretty substantially.  My hypothesis, though I can never prove it, was that the Obama Administration wanted to put as much pressure on Congress as possible, and closing the Washington Monument doesn't work as leverage if some damn private company is keeping it open.  My competitors and I banded together and took the US Forest Service to court (past articles here) and were in the process of winning our case when the shutdown ended, but ever since then the US Forest Service has allowed us to stay open in shutdowns.  If you have WSJ access, they actually covered our effort here; I made an early morning appearance on Fox & Friends; Reason TV did a nice piece; and Hans Bader of the CEI was all over the story and a big help in getting the issue some visibility.

Christmas and New Years are popular times for folks to visit in places like Sedona and Florida where we run Forest Service recreation areas, and we are happy we have been able to stay open and serve them this time around.

**Postscript: This private concession management model also has a benefit in state and local budget battles, though it is slightly different.  I can tell you from loooooong personal experience that the public really does not like recreation use fees on public lands.  My taxes should pay for that!  But now, and certainly in the future, our taxes go mostly to fund programmed expenses like healthcare and welfare plus our bloated military.  Anything else is going to be starved -- which leads to the estimated $114 billion in deferred maintenance in federal / state / local public recreation areas and parks ($20+ billion in the National Park Service alone).  Seeing this happening, most of the public has become reconciled to user fees for recreation as long as the recreation fee is used to support the local park they are visiting.

To this end, one reason folks are sometimes leery about private management of these lands is they wonder if their fees are being sucked away to some corporate equivalent of Scrooge McDuck's gold vault rather than supporting operations at the park.  It's the reason I keep this chart up on our web site:

In fact, it is the government agencies themselves that often sweep user fees out of the parks and into general revenue funds.  The Arizona legislature did this for years to the state parks agency.  The result in this situation is that the infrastructure crumbles while the user fees that should be fixing these issues actually has just become another general revenue tax.  I think of deferred maintenance in government facilities -- parks, subways, roads, etc -- as a kind of shadow borrowing where government officials borrow against the infrastructure.  This borrowing is almost invisible, at least on an incremental basis, and often the debt is eventually defaulted on as the infrastructure is never repaired and has to be closed or torn down.  By putting parks under concession management, user fees can no longer be swept away from the management and maintenance of the park, and private companies can often be held accountable for poor maintenance more readily than agencies are able to hold themselves accountable.

Hans Bader submitted a FOIA on October 9 about US Forest Service and Dept. of Agriculture decision-making leading up to the unprecedented shutdown of private operations on US Forest Service land.  I have seen the FOIA results and -- almost laughably -- virtually all of the documents relate to the end of the shutdown, and all of the documents are dated after the date of his FOIA.  In other words, the US Forest Service essentially ignored the documents requested by the FOIA request and submitted a stacks of unrelated documents.

More from Mr. Bader here

My competitor Eric Mart does a great job explaining the issues.

For several days now I have been highlighting article after article (here and here) where the only service downside of the government shutdown anyone can come up with is the closure of parks.  Here is another example, from the AP entitled "Lawmakers feeling heat from Government Shutdown".  Its all parks:

Some 800,000 federal workers deemed nonessential were staying home again Wednesday in the first partial shutdown since the winter of 1995-96.

Across the nation, America roped off its most hallowed symbols: the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, the Statue of Liberty in New York, Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, the Washington Monument.

Its natural wonders — the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Smoky Mountains and more — put up “Closed” signs and shooed campers away.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said he was getting pleas from businesses that rely on tourists. “The restaurants, the hotels, the grocery stores, the gasoline stations, they’re all very devastated with the closing of the parks,” he said.

The far-flung effects reached France, where tourists were barred from the U.S. cemetery overlooking the D-Day beaches at Normandy. Twenty-four military cemeteries abroad have been closed.

Only 22,000 of those 800,000 run parks.  Apparently none of the others do anything we will miss.  Oh, they come up with one new one:

Even fall football is in jeopardy. The Defense Department said it wasn’t clear that service academies would be able to participate in sports, putting Saturday’s Army vs. Boston College and Air Force vs. Navy football games on hold, with a decision to be made Thursday.

Eek!  I joke about this but I fear that today this is going to bite me right in the butt.  Our company operates campgrounds on land we lease from the US Forest Service.  Since we pay all expenses of the operation, take no government money, and employ no government workers, we have never closed in a shutdown and the US Forest Service confirmed at noon yesterday we would not have to close this time.  But apparently someone above the US Forest Service somewhere in the Administration is proposing to reverse this, and illegally close us.  My guess is that they realize parks are the only thing the public misses, and so the Administration trying to see if it can close more of them, even ones that are operated privately and off the government budget.

Update:  This is very similar to what is happening in DC.  By trying to close us, the USFS is actually costing themselves more money (since we pay rent to them based on our revenues) with the only goal being to make the closure worse.  The Administration has ordered the same thing to occur in DC parks, where they are spending far more money "closing" monuments than they do just having them open all the time

Yesterday, the sight of a group of World War II veterans storming the barricaded monument built in their honor in Washington, D.C., became the buzzworthy moment from the first day of our federal shutdown.  The open-air, unmanned outdoor memorial had been barricaded to keep people from "visiting" due to the government shutdown, though there was no real (as in “non-political”) reason to have done so. Barricades certainly wouldn’t prevent vandals from busting in there at night if they wanted to. It was an absurd, petty move.

This morning, Charlie Spiering of the Washington Examiner returned to the memorial to find a gaggle of “essential” government workers there to barricade it once again. He tweeted that the employees fled after cameras started filming them working, but then came back to attach “closed” signs. A couple of them appear to be talking to the media. The barricades are apparently there, but have not been tied together and are therefore easily removed.