I am still skimming the report.  Certainly private partnerships play a role in the recommendations, but they appear to be the more tepid “private partnerships to increase revenue” rather than the more impactful ”private partnerships to reduce operating costs.”  At best, private partnerships might generate a few extra million dollars in park revenues, but private operations could cut park operations costs by half, or by over $100 million.

Second, there are roles and functions that could and should be reviewed and could be transferable to private sector operations.  For example, NPS directly operates most of its campgrounds while a sister federal agency, the Forest Service, relies largely on concessioners.  NPS campgrounds are now underutilized, full only during peak seasons and some weekends.  Concessioner operation would add camper services, introduce dynamic pricing and start marketing these campgrounds.  NPS costs would drop by millions of dollars, its receipts from franchise fees would rise … and campers would have increased satisfaction levels.  Estimated net financial gain from this change is at least $25 million.

The other related advantage of private operation, particularly in a concession model where companies are paid with visitor fees, is that these fees are protected from legislative sweeps and government closures.  By contract, the user fees in concession contracts remain in the park, supporting operations and improvements.

None of the panelists, including me, advocated for privatizing National Parks.  The whole point of public lands, as I have written on this site before, is to change the decision-making calculus around development of and access to these lands from net present value to broader access and more natural settings.  In other words, no one wants a McDonalds in front of Old Faithful.

What I did advocate for, as discussed starting around the 7 minute mark, is for privatization of certain operational tasks, from bathroom cleaning to maintenance to landscaping, in order to reduce costs.  Already, the high cost of using civil service employees to perform these tasks are crowding out things like maintenance and renovation.

I won’t be coy — the authors interviewed me several times and I helped them find the relevant data.  But they did a great job outlining how parks agencies can reduce operating costs and thus keep their parks open using PPP’s for park operations.  A great primer for those interested in this model.

All the details, speakers, and agenda are at ParkConference.com.

Should National Park’s be privatized, in the sense that they are turned entirely over to private owners?  No.  Public lands are in public hands for a reason — the public wants the government, not, say, Ritz-Carlton, to decide the use and character and access to the land.  No one wants a McDonald’s in front of Old Faithful, a common fear I hear time and again when privatization is mentioned.

However, once the agency determines the character of and facilities on the land, should their operation (as opposed to their ownership) be privatized?  Sure.   The NPS faces hundreds of millions of dollars in capital needs and deferred maintenance.  It is crazy to use its limited budget to have Federal civil service employees cleaning bathrooms and manning the gatehouse, when private companies have proven they can do a quality job so much less expensively.  The US Forest Service, for example, has had private operators in over a thousand of its largest parks for nearly thirty years, and unlike state parks agencies or even the NPS, it is not considering park closures or accumulating deferred maintenance, despite having its recreation budget axed.  Why? Because its partnership program with private operators is a fundamentally sounder, lower-cost approach to park operations.

In fact, such public-private partnerships are nothing new for the NPS.  The NPS was an early innovator in this field, and currently private companies operate many of the visitor services in parks, such as lodges and gift shops.  The US Forest Service innovation, which has been copied by many agencies including most recently California State Parks, has been to turn over operations of the whole park, not just the lodge, to a private company.  These are highly structured contracts, wherein the private company cannot modify the facilities or change fees without agency approval, and must meet a range of detailed performance goals.

Most critiques of private park operations center around quality and fees.  While there certainly have been some isolated failures, in general the results have been quite good.  In Arizona, a recent poll by CampArizona.com ranked the top 10 public campgrounds in Arizona.  Of these, three of the top five were US Forest Service campgrounds run by a private operator, as was the top Arizona campground in Sunset Magazine’s “Best of the West”  (OK, I have to brag, these are all run by my company). As for fee concerns, state-run parks in California charge $30 for a no-hookup camp site.  Privately operated public campgrounds in California forests seldom charge more than $18.

My company operates over 150 state, county, and federal parks.  I encourage you to take the “Pepsi Challenge” and see some of them for yourself.  They are well-run, generally with more staff than a typical state park, and have no significant deferred maintenance backlog.  Oh, and not a single one has a McDonald’s, a billboard, or a neon sign in front of a national monument.

The first looks at which types of public decisions should stay public in a privatization effort

The second looks at implementation issues and learning in privatization

The third acknowledges that privatization efforts can fall into cronyism, but points out that generally in these cases the public alternative falls into the same behaviors.  A great example is prisons, where privatization is derided by folks like Think Progress for the lobbying the prison companies do both for contracts and harsher laws, but they never acknowledge that public prison unions have demonstrated the same behaviors and for much longer.

So, do state parks need to have what is essentially the highest local law enforcement officer density of any spot in the country? The answer, with a few exceptions, is generally no.  Our company operates scores of parks where sensible rules enforcement combined with backup from a local sheriff is more than sufficient to keep recreators safe.  And that is the point of public recreation — to give the public a fun, safe outdoors experience.  The point is not to concentrate the public on public lands in order for law enforcement to more carefully monitor their behavior so as to identify infractions.

One reason most park staff have law enforcement credentials is not due to demand, but due to incentives.  Law enforcement certification increases pay, opens up promotion opportunities, and in most states allows access to much more lucrative pension plans.  Some people also get psychic benefits from carrying a gun and a badge.

Though this is not the type of article I generally expect to see at The Frisky, but Julie Gerstein has a interesting piece called, “I Went Camping, And All I Got Was Harassed By The Police.” As I tell my clients all the time, providing customer service with law enforcement officials has more downsides than just cost.

Update: I edited out some details from the original post that referred to specific parks in which we operate.  While these details came from public, online review sites rather than from our insider knowledge, upon reflection I have decided it was not professional to discuss problems in the partnerships we are a part of.  The agency referenced is in many ways more advanced and innovative than most any other recreation agency we deal with.  Focusing just on this one issue, where I disagree with their approach, left an impression about that agency’s overal competance which I did not mean to convey

The experiment upon which the state is set to embark will provide an opportunity to compare the relative efficacy of resource management provided by central government control, private ownership, and local cooperation.

I welcome this comparison.  In fact, I long for it.  Beg for it.  I have always thought it was telling that for all the skepticism aimed at private operations of public facilities, the private operators in this case are the ones who have been begging for an independent comparison of costs and results, while state agencies have resisted such studies.  I wrote in the comments:

I was one of four private companies that bid on these parks. One thing that is often lost in all this is that there are over 1000 very similar public parks already under management in a USFS service program that dates back over 30 years. Three of the four bidders for the CA parks, and the winning bidder, came from this program.

I applaud your observation that a natural experiment seems to exist here. But the odd part, for me, is that such an experiment has existed for decades, and no one wants to follow up. Here in AZ, AZ state parks has 35-ish parks under its management and our company has 35-ish federal parks under private management. Many are next door to each other. But it turned out to be virtually impossible to get the faculty at Arizona State who was preparing recommendations on private management, or the press, or the agency itself to actually do the comparison. Everyone wants to hypothesize on the results based on their faith or lack thereof in private enterprise, no one wants to do a direct comparison.

This frustrated me since I knew we managed the parks at half the cost, and had better customer service (camparizona.com ranks public campgrounds. In the survey taken a year or so ago our company had 3 of the top 5 public campgrounds under our management, and the state parks agency had zero)

I tried to do one direct comparison on my own: http://parkprivatization.com/2012/01/case-study-private-vs-public-park-operations/. It would be awesome if someone in academia were to take this on. Those interested should contact me at my park blog: http://www.parkppp.com.

By the way, it is incorrect to talk about loss of control to private operators. All of our contracts are highly structured with hundreds of pages of standards and restrictions. We cannot add a new service, modify or add structures or facilities, change fees, or most anything else without seeking approval from the parks agency. The agency still establishes the character and services and facilities of the park – we just provide the customer service and cleaning much less expensively.

These contracts are almost always structured as concession agreements, meaning the private operator gets paid just with gate fees from the customer, not with appropriations. If customers hate the park or the service, no revenues. I get asked all the time, “won’t you just stop cleaning the bathrooms so you can make more money.” I answer, “Sure, same way that McDonalds and Marriott and Nordstroms make most of their money by not cleaning their bathrooms.”

California is close to finalizing bids from private companies to take over day-to-day operations of six state parks, including Brannan Island here, in an unprecedented step by the state to prevent mass park closures after stiff budget cuts.

On Monday, the state expects to finish its first corporate agreement, under which American Land & Leisure Co. would take over operations of three state parks for five years, the California Department of Parks and Recreation said. Three other state parks also are slated for private management, which covers running all concessions, visitor services, security and parks’ legal liabilities. The state will maintain ownership of the park lands.

The corporate bids are part of California’s last-ditch effort to keep more state parks open. The nation’s second-biggest parks system by area after Alaska’s has been in a tailspin in recent years, with annual funding slashed by $23 million—or 20%—since 2009.