Article from Reason by Eric Boehm.
Nearly three weeks into the government shutdown, some of America’s national parks are starting to get a bit rank. Access is free, since there are no employees to collect the typical $35-per-vehicle entrance fees, but that comes with the trade-off of there being no employees to empty trash bins or clean toilets either.
But at Yellowstone National Park, National Public Radio reports, local businesses are chipping in to make sure the bathrooms get cleaned, the roads get plowed, and the tourists keep coming. Even in the middle of winter, the park gets an estimated 20,000 visitors per month—and those hardy folks want to rent snowmobiles, hire tour guides, and take sightseeing trips. The private-sector businesses that thrive on those tourist dollars have a pretty strong incentive to make sure Yellowstone remains accessible.
Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which runs the only hotels inside Yellowstone that remain open during the winter, is leading the effort to cover the $7,500 daily tab for keeping the roads plowed and the snowmobile trails groomed during the shutdown, according to NPR. Thirteen other private businesses that offer tours of the park are chipping in $300 a day to help cover that expense.
Meanwhile, Xanterra has some of its own employees assigned to clean park bathrooms during the shutdown, and snowmobile tour guides are packing their own toilet paper for customers to use.
Read the entire article at Reason.
Image Credit:Â By Petrit Bejdoni [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Suggests a case for transferring management back to the states. Seems they have more to lose and gain from proper upkeep of these parks. Clearly the democrats don’t give a damn.
Let private operators bid on and run the National Parks and see how much cheaper and better the parks are run.
This is the way it should be!!!!
$7,500 to keep the roads open sounds too high. The government is usually paying that much? Sounds like over charging. It is a lot of work, but that much money?
It is quite a few hundred miles of road. Yellowstone is huge.
There is also quite a bit of snow in the Rockies, plowing roads is time consuming, fuel consuming, & sand consuming. IDK what it costs on a daily basis, but it is not cheap.
Happy to hear that Xanterra is taking care of business,my son worked for them 4 or 5 years