Yuck, please no! The privately-run concessionaires inside the parks are already terrible, providing poorly-maintained lodge rooms at cutthroat prices and overpriced terrible restaurants. At least most of the private guiding companies are good.
These parks are our nation's shared treasures, they should just be free like the D.C. museums. The last thing they need is more privatization. The NPS does a fine job at providing the visitor services that AREN'T totally commercialized (rangers, upkeep, lotteries, etc.)
Actually all those problems are precisely because NPS does not privatize instead once it figures out it can not provide basic services it grudgingly invites private players with very little freedom to run their business or pricing.
The NPS doesn't control concessionaire prices. All of the problems with the private concessionaires of that want to make a profit, so they put as little money in as possible while setting prices as high as possible.
What makes you think privatizing would fix any of that? It'd just be another Universal / Disney / etc. with overpriced foods AND overpriced admissions
Edit: And this also totally misses the point of the parks to begin with. They're there not just to entertain visitors but to preserve these landscapes for posterity. Privatizing them would totally go against that. We don't need anymore land barons exploiting the masses and preventing them from experiencing the places they have a birthright to.
National parks in the US have a strong focus on preservation/conservation. Those in Canada put a lot more emphasis on recreation.
Having been to the Canadian ones, it is quite easy to see extremely well managed private businesses in parks. I didn't have a single poor experience (compared to the US ones).
Of course, making management of the whole park private? No way.
A good way to make a bad situation worse. The park service has already been doing that with campsite management and concessions[1]. Unfortunately we aren't willing to budget enough to take care of the parks properly (and visitors continue to trash them).
What type of services? Will taxes be reduced as people will have to pay for those services or are they going to be subsidized?
I'm only ever a tourist in the US but I visit National parks and I'd hate to see public land go private for-profit, ads everywhere, and whatever else shit they can think of.
Concession operations in national parks have existed since 1872, when the Yellowstone Park Act authorized the Secretary of the Interior to grant leases to private persons to develop visitor accommodations and facilities. [1]
I think you're underestimating just how extremely unprofitable NPS is. Nobody but a complete sucker or die hard altruist would join a private partnership with a national park... though the most likely outcome would be that someone would find (or intentionally insert) some loop hole to exploit natural resources within the parkland and just turn it into resource extraction. Alternatively, I suppose you could make it so severely exclusive that you could turn parks into an exclusive resort for the super rich and start charging outrageous sums to visit them while pulling down your maintenance costs to just some luxury spa.
Either way it'd be awful and likely just lead to bankrupted parks in disrepair.
Privitization would make the park an amusement park at the expense of access to nature. Actual nature access is a liability nightmare. There are 12-15 deaths per year a Yosemite, just to give an example. That's more people per two years than have died at disney land in its entire existence, even though disney gets an order of magnitude higher visitors.
I completely disagree but if the current regime lasts it’s inevitable. The burgeoning federal debt will be used politically (not operationally!) to force selling federally assets especially land and leases to the politically well connected.
Bush II actually did a lot of that already. Much of the fee yielding aspects of the big parks have already been sold/leased. I'm not sure any of the lodges or concessions are still run by the park service, and at the larger parks the campgrounds/etc are also run by various private companies taking their slice.
Even the reservation system as we were recently discussing now has a corp entity eating the majority of the "profit".
And the NPS tries to put a positive spin on the whole thing, cause we all know big corps are more efficient (/snark) https://www.nps.gov/orgs/csp/index.htm
They get the ENTIRE bid and they got in trouble for skirting fee review laws. RECREATION.GOV is one of the most egregious bastardizations of the American public lands. You should be as outraged as if you found out toxic waste was being dumped on the National Parks themselves.
You MUST use recreation.gov and you MUST agree to the privacy policy which INCLUDES connection to Google's tracking servers. That is IF you want to use the public lands we are "preserving" for you to use in the first place.
