Probably no more posts this week as the Antiplanner is heading down to Crater Lake for RACLTTOD–Ride Around Crater Lake Three Times in One Day. The Crater Lake rim road is about 33 miles around with about 3,800 feet of elevation gain. Three laps, with a couple of side trips to a point called Cloud Cap, make a hundred miles with nearly 12,000 feet in elevation gain.
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Don’t bother Googling RACLTTOD; as far as I know I am the only one to have done such a ride, about four years ago. This year I have challenged a couple of friends to join me. I’ll let you know next week if I make it.
That’s quite the profile there. I hope you were able to find a good place to park so you could keep your food there! Enjoy.
DS
Have fun. I hope you are able to find some silence on your trip. Watch out for Floridian tourists who lack mountain driving skills.
On a related note, the Rim Drive is a completely government-built and government-subsidized road that receives no money from gas taxes. Most of CRLA’s annual $5 million budget goes to plowing the Rim Drive. East Rim should be completely closed to auto traffic and limited to bicycle and pedestrian use only.
On a related note, the Rim Drive is a completely government-built and government-subsidized road that receives no money from gas taxes.
Did you happen to notice that you pay a fee upon entering the park? Guess where that money goes.
Having worked for the NPS for a decade, I know exactly where that money goes. I know that Crater Lake is visited by less than 500k people a year (440k last year) and that visitors pay $10 per VEHICLE (not person) for a seven-day pass and that fees are collected only during the summer (meaning about 50,000 people don’t pay a fee). The operating budget at CRLA is $550k. That translates to about $12 per VISITOR (not per car). Of the $10 per car collected at Crater Lake, 80% stays in the park for various projects and 20% is reallocated elsewhere in the NPS at the discretion of the NPS Director. In 2009, there was a whopping 20% collection cost to bring in $170m system wide, so perhaps 40% of fees at Crater Lake do not go to road maintenance in the park. I don’t have the time to try to find the exact amount that Crater Lake collected in fees in 2009, but I guarantee it’s not enough to pay for operating costs and road maintenance. No way. Not even close.
Operating budget at CRLA should read $5.5 million.
The NPS and CRLA websites are a complete mess, and the park budget is restricted to NPS personnel, but here is what entrance fee money was spent on between 2001 and 2005: “the restoration of the Watchman Fire Lookout and Trailside Museum, stabilization of the old Superintendent’s Residence, installation of public restrooms in remote areas along Rim Drive, and short distance travelers’ information AM radio stations located at strategic points along entrance routes to the park.” In 2009, the NPS spent $1.9 million in fee money to “Develop, Produce and Install New & Replacement Interpretive Exhibits at Rim Village.” Maybe the 2009 chipseal project and its environmental damage was paid for through fee money, but I can’t sure can’t find information supporting that. There’s a lot of information about the NPS that is hard to find, including an exact amount spent on road maintenance and the source of those funds.
I’m all for entrance fees paid at a park for staying in a park to cover operating and maintenance costs. At Crater Lake, that would mean increasing entrance fees per person or reducing services and infrastructure. Of course, if a non-profit land trust took over management and kicked the large multinational corpoartion Xanterra out and kept the revenue from concessions(who pay a paltry 3% franchise fee) to fund operations and maintenance, while selling memberships in the Trust, then the park might become self-sufficient and self-sustaining while being locally managed.
In the current system, about 80% of visitors spend only a few hours in Crater Lake National Park along West Rim Drive. Why should these visitors subsidize a joyride around East Rim Drive for the other 20%? It’s time to close East Rim Drive to motorized vehicles. It’s time to turn park management over to non-profit trusts.
The NPS and CRLA websites are a complete mess…
No kidding. I just looked. There was a lot of information, but very little of what I was looking for.
I visited Crater Lake a few years back. I hope to return sometime soon as it was a very enjoyable trip. Next time I’ll stay longer, too.
It is a beautiful and special place. If you’re looking for places to go off the beaten path, both near and away from the lake, let me know.
As an undergrad, I had a class on government agencies, where the prof started the quarter by assigning us a state and telling us to write a paper on the wildlife agency, ensure several given questions were answered, and that was it. No more instruction. It took most students at least a week to figger out how to navigate the sites, as this was the dawn of The Internets and the sites weren’t intended to be navigable. Also, we had an exercise where we set entrance fees and covered maintenance budgets and tracked visitorship. Our instructios were to make the parks accessible to as many people as possible and to cover expenses. We quickly found out it is one or the other, not both. Just like the difficulty in making the MUSYA work.
That is: Multiple Conflicting Priorities.
DS
“…we had an exercise where we set entrance fees and covered maintenance budgets and tracked visitorship. Our instructios were to make the parks accessible to as many people as possible and to cover expenses. We quickly found out it is one or the other, not both.”
This exercise neglected an important economic piece if the pie: concessions. Concessions run restaurants, hotels, gift shops, campgrounds. If massive, privately held, government-granted monopolies like Xanterra weren’t mining and exporting monetary resources, parks could be sustainable and affordable. Entrance fees could be set to pay for base services. Profits from concession activities could support other services. Memberships could provide additional revenue and fundraising opportunities.
When you were working on your project, were you looking at concessions? I’d sure like to know more about their profit margins, but I can’t find any specific financials on these privately-owned giants.
I worked in Denali National Park a while back. Aarmank seemed to be doing pretty well. Besides the fact that they’re corporatist scum bags, treat their employees like shit, treat tourist poorly, and use sacred American land to exploit people, they make a ton of money selling bus rides, sleeping accommodations, and concessions. I wonder how much of that cash the NPS sees?
“I wonder how much of that cash the NPS sees?”
According to the NPS, the average franchise fee is 5% of the contract’s value. (I’ve seen fees as low as 2% in western parks.) Twenty percent of this 5% goes to the “overall management of the NPS Commercial Services Program.” The funds that stay in the park “are reinvested to keep the concession operations in the park running efficiently.”
The NPS site linked above claims there were $1b in concessionaires’ gross receipts. Assuming an average 5% fee based on the gross value all contracts, that means $50m came back to the NPS, $10m of that going to maintain bureaucracy. It seems that the other $40m goes to capital improvements that directly benefit concessionaires.
Pretty ridiculous.
I think some aspects of the Park could cover costs or even make a profit, such as the limited camping, the view, the boat ride, the lodge, the restaurant, and the store. The visitor center could probably cover operating costs but not capital costs.
The rim road, educational signage, research on archeology and geology, and other missions would not come close to covering their costs. The Park could probably make more revenue by offering high-end lodging and boat, plane and helicopter tours. Selling home/cabin sites could bring in big revenue, even if they had restrictions to protect the water quality.
I am not saying that I am in favor of any of that — I am just making observations. I think the Antiplanner wrote a book about how natural resource management could be done by libertarian economics. That is an interesting thing to consider, but I think that has big strengths and big weaknesses.
Are parks a service or a business? Lots of people have no issue with pay taxes that go towards a money losing outfit such as our wonderful park system. I have no issue questioning what money goes where and why for basic financial reasons. But what’s next, pay 25 cents to look at a duck in your local park? How about selling Mulnomah Falls to Coca-Cola and draining its crystal clear water for Coca-Cola? We can then call it Coca-Cola Falls. It will make money, too!
A bit of a sarcastic post, yes, but where do we draw the line? Parks will always lose money — but that’s not the point of public parks.
“Lots of people have no issue with pay taxes that go towards a money losing outfit such as our wonderful park system.”
Appeal to the majority.
“But what’s next, pay 25 cents to look at a duck in your local park?”
Slippery slope.
The system is already corporatist. The NPS has “Proud Partners” including Time, Ford, AmericanAirlines, Kodak, and Discovery Channel and additional corporate sponsors, including Coca-Cola, that receive tax and advertising benefits through corporate “donations”.
The system was originally intended to be self-sustaining:
In 1914, William Steele, “father” and superintendent of Crater Lake National Park, wrote:
The “wonderful park system” is not so wonderful when you consider the enormous wasteful bureaucracy; the government spends twice as much on regional offices and national administration than it does to operate the 58 national parks (by name) in the system.
Appealing to an ignorant majority does not counter the case that private, non-profit trusts could sustainably manage national parks without using or even “always” losing taxpayer money or without selling out national parks (as the government has to industrial tourism, including the automobile industry, oil industry, and hospitality industry).
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