Under one-party rule, the swamp contracts out decision-making about our state and federal parks to private corporations. Enough. From Florida Phoenix:
Private company controls access to public land at Florida national park
Prices are skyrocketing to visit the springs at Ocala National Forest, and look for more with the budget slashing going on.
Silver Glen Springs is part of the Ocala National Forest, created by order of President Teddy Roosevelt in 1908. The cost to visit has gone so high, some say it’s become unaffordable. (Photo via St. Johns River Water Management District)
I have a friend named Sandra Friend. She writes guidebooks about hiking in Florida. Not long ago, my friend named Friend contacted me about a different kind of hike: the hike in prices for using our national parks and forests.
She told me via email that she was “horrified to discover fees at springs in the Ocala National Forest have risen to $13 PER PERSON.” Even worse, she said, parking now costs an additional $20.
Ten years ago, she said, the fee for visiting the springs was just $5.50. Back then, parking was free. It was still free just five years ago, she said.
From “free” to “$20” — that’s the kind of a high jump you’d see in an Olympic track and field competition.
It’s not the U.S. Forest Service that’s collecting all this money, either. It’s a private corporation called Naventure.
Naventure’s CEO got his start as a landscape architect, then began running a zipline company. Now, his company is raking in the big bucks running concessions at both Ocala National Forest and Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina.
“Welcoming 750,000 visitors annually, Naventure is one of the largest public/private partners of the U.S. Forest Service,” the company boasted in a 2023 press release.
I wasn’t an economics major, but I seem to recall reading that corporations are different from government agencies. Unlike the government, they’re trying to make a profit.
Because the current occupant of the White House is trying to slash the number of National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service employees, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing in the future. He cares more about what’s being sold in the gift shops than whether the trails are clear or the bathrooms clean.
“I think the bottom line here is that with reductions in force, the concessionaires have more power and leverage to set their own fees,” said Clay Henderson, author of “Forces of Nature: A History of Florida Land Conservation.” “This seems to go against the grain that our public lands should be accessible to all.”
Public land, private profit
I talked to several people who were as dismayed as Friend about paying more to use the forest and its springs.
One of them, Tamara “Tami” Jicha, a Paisley resident who goes camping every single month, told me that the fees and the requirement that campers park at their campsite and walk to the springs — a difficult feat with small children — has hurt the outdoor experience for her.
“I just think that the system is broken,” she told me. “They need to go back to having forestry personnel.”
What’s happening in the Ocala National Forest is not an isolated instance of a private company profiting from public land.
A Substack called “More Than Just Parks” reported that something similar is happening at national parks all across the country.
“What was built as a public good now functions like a luxury resort,” the newsletter reported. “Corporations manage the bookings. Contractors collect the fees. Visitors navigate a web of apps, lotteries, and credit card forms just to reach what they already own.”
As a result, “a weeklong trip to Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Glacier now easily runs north of $6,000 for a family of four.”
Suddenly, the cost of a trip to Disney World doesn’t sound so expensive, does it?
Meanwhile, the National Parks Service staff has lost nearly a quarter of its permanent staff, according to John Adornato of the National Parks Conservation Association. The park system has lost 24% of its permanent workforce, he told me.
In addition to the loss of those permanent staffers, the service hasn’t hired its usual 8,000 summer season staffers, he said.
The result: fewer rangers to protect visitors and resources, less interpretation and education for the public, slower emergency response times in case of a fire or drowning, and more strain on the dwindling number who remain.
“We have serious concerns for the long term about what this is doing to the visitor experience as well as what it’s doing to the natural resources,” Adornato told me.
The cuts are “taking an emotional toll on the staff,” he added. “It’s not like they’re making big paychecks. They’re serving because they have a love of place and a love of the national parks.”
But hey, what’s all that angst when compared to a bunch of billionaires’ need for another big tax cut?
No one at the gate
The national parks are, as documentary filmmaker Ken Burns pointed out, “America’s best idea.”
A lot of people still think that. Recently the current administration asked park visitors to report anything they saw that’s “negative about either past or living Americans.” Instead, most of the comments “overwhelmingly praise the parks as beautiful national treasures, with dozens complimenting rangers for their knowledge and navigational help. Many called for undoing funding cuts and rehiring staff who were fired,” The Washington Post reported. The only serious complaints were about mosquitoes.
But the park and forests have long struggled with hiring concessionaires to run some customer service features.
In the years after Congress created the first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, “park concession development was chaotic,” an online history says.
“The railroad lines built the first facilities in an attempt to increase passenger traffic in the west, but their earliest lodgings were little more than tent cities or recreations of eastern Victorian hotels,” the history says. “The Yosemite Valley was a sprawl of unregulated and competitive tourist accommodations.”
In 1925, Interior Department officials “came to the conclusion that providers of public services in parks should be limited.”
In other words, no more free-for-all competition. Instead, they had to sign contracts with single concessionaires, granting them a monopoly over certain functions such as canoe rentals or campsite reservations.
Even then, there was no thought of letting the concessionaires run the whole park. After all, the park rangers undergo special training and education to do their jobs. The concessionaires? Not so much.
Henderson told me he recently made his first visit to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, While there, he saw first-hand the problem that results from firing rangersand replacing them with a private company’s employees.
“There was no one at the entrance gate to collect the $30 entry fee,” he told me. “In the 25-mile trip to the visitor center, I saw no rangers. Indeed, there were no rangers at the visitor center. The only people there were concessionaire employees.”
The difference between the rangers and the concession employees soon became obvious: “Visitors asked them the kind of questions you might expect to ask a ranger, but these either elderly or college-age summer employees had no idea.”
Things could be worse. Henderson pointed out that, over the weekend, a wildfire burned down the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, built in 1937.
“Were there not enough rangers left to fight the fire?” he asked.
Teddy’s legacy
A lot of modern politicians call themselves “Teddy Roosevelt conservationists.” One is our own Gov. Ron DeSantis.
But Teddy never built a concentration camp in the middle of one of the parks, preserves or forests. Nor did he ever veto money for tearing down a dam that inundated part of a national forest. Those are just two actions that indicate DeSantis falls far short of being the new TR.
In fact, no modern Teddy wannabe has done nearly as much as the original. He created the first national wildlife reserve (Pelican Island, here in Florida) and the first national monuments. Now we have hundreds across the nation, and other countries have copied our wildlife reserve idea.
Roosevelt also created the national forest system. Then, in 1908, he signed the order establishing the 387,000-acre Ocala National Forest, the third national forest to be created east of the Mississippi.
The forest was worth protecting because it contains the largest existing area of sand pine in the world. It also contains more than 600 swamps, lakes, rivers, and springs, not to mention the largest population of Florida scrub jays in the state.
About 650,000 people visit Ocala National Forest every year, according to the U.S. Forest Service. As if to underline its continuing value, last year National Geographic named the Ocala National Forest one of the best travel destinations in the world. The magazine praised its natural beauty, diverse ecosystems, and recreational opportunities like swimming in crystal-clear springs
“We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune,” Teddy said once. Then he probably added, “Bully!” a few times.
Teddy made no mention of making a fortune off selling access to this glorious heritage.
Fistfights and stiff fees
I will say this for Naventure: Unlike some Florida politicians, their CEO — the former landscape architect and zipline entrepreneur — was willing to answer most of my questions.
Naventure took over concessions for 12 of the venues in Ocala National Forest at the start of March 2020, CEO Ken Stamps told me. Three weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everything shut down.
“We had to bear 100% of the operating costs with no revenue coming in,” Stamps recalled.
The company has certainly made up for that loss. Under its exclusive contract, Naventure pays a percentage of its gross revenue to the U.S. Forest Service.
Stamps wouldn’t tell me how much that works out to be. But he did tell me that in the last five years, the company has invested $3 million into the facilities there, which should give you an idea of the kind of moolah they’re making.
Stamps boasted about how Naventure can move faster than the government when required. At one point, a water system broke and needed $120,000 in repairs, he told me. The Forest Service would have had to wait for federal approval, but Naventure was able to call in workers immediately, he said.
When I asked him about the higher charges for users, he blamed two factors: rising national inflation and Florida’s voter-approved increase in the minimum wage.
The reason for the newer parking charge is more complicated, he said.
People who wanted to use the springs would show up in droves on the weekends, he said. The cars would line up and gridlock would ensue, with frustrations and anger following.
“We were having significant safety issues,” Stamps said. “Fistfights broke out.”
Naventure imposed an online reservation system to limit the number of people trying to park at the springs, he said. Because that limited the number of people who were paying to get in, the company had to balance that out with the parking charge, he said.
“Of course,” he acknowledged, “that means someone who lives in Ocala can’t just roll out of bed and show up here and get to be the first in line anymore.” Instead, people who drive in from far away now have as much of a chance to splash in a spring as anyone else, he said.
Stamps told me that “we’re training our staff to be environment docents.”
When I asked what he meant by that, he backpedaled. What he meant, he said, was that they would be trained “so they at least understand the ecology of Florida’s springs.” That’s a far cry from the kind of training the Forest Service gives its employees.
When I broached the possibility of federal budget cuts leaving more and more park and forest operations in the hands of concessionaires like Naventure, Stamps frowned and paused, then said, “That is a possibility.”
If that happens, don’t look for the prices to go down. After all, as Stamps explained to me, “We’re obviously a for-profit company.”
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