Suit alleges recreation.gov cluttered with junk fees, seeks millions in refunds
nationalparkstraveler.org
nationalparkstraveler.org
Many places now on recreation.gov used to require you to fax in reservations and wait days for a confirmation, or else just do the drive up and fill out a paper slip thing the morning of (too bad if they're all gone).
Sure, it'd be nice to clean up the fees and get more money to the parks themselves, but I gotta give credit to the website for cleaning up what used to be a nightmare and turning it into a pretty streamlined (if slightly more expensive) process.
Edit: Imagine if we had a similar system for the departments of motor vehicles... pay 20% more but get it all done in minutes online instead of hours at the local office. Who wouldn't pay for that if they could afford it?
Of course it would be better to have actually functional public services, but our governments just don't seem to be set up to actually be effective at basic services. Is it worse for public dollars to get funneled to a public private partnership with an overhead, that at least delivers a functional product, or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?
Here's one example from the article
Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330 individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz Allen’s arrangement with the federal government, it could pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for the Middle Fork lottery
I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.
I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.
In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.
Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors.
How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day.
Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc.
Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor.
$6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.
The cool thing about the US is that it's a democracy. If you feel so strongly about this, make this case to the government. There's precedent and it's bad, it's called healthcare.gov. I don't mean this in a pithy way btw, I'm a transit activist and I go to protests, phone up lawmakers, and attend public meetings. There are a wide array of small reasons that all sum up to the government being really bad at certain things. But again, this can change with you and me. Don't be emotional on HN, be emotional to your state reps!
> The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork.
You're forgetting the huge growth our National Parks have seen. The days of the toll booth worked when the US had a fraction of its people, a fraction of the motor vehicle traffic, before the virality of social media, and with a more ingrained belief that a national park was a rugged place and not a place to take the family in an air conditioned, controlled experience. The old system of phone calls would have just made the parks out of reach for all of these new folks interested in them.
Except this isn't true. 2022 saw 311.9 million visitors, up from 2000 which saw 285.8 million. That's not "huge" growth, that's not even keeping up with population growth (2020: 329 million vs 2000: 282 million). https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/visitation-numbers.htm
For example, Smoky Mountains NP went from 8M in 1980 to 10M in 2000 to 14M in 2022.
Zion went from 1M in 1980 to 2.4M in 2000 to 4.7 M in 2022.
Yosemite went from 2.5M to 5M+, much of that concentrated in the Valley.
For the impacted parks, it is very difficult to keep up with that sort of growth. It's not like those parks grow bigger to keep up with visitation, or hire staff at the same rate, or are able to build more parking lots.
Edit: And also, for Wilderness-designated areas -- whose purpose is to provide a "wilderness feel" for current and future generations, as distinct from the "crowded Yosemite lodge feel" -- it's an even tougher ask. There are only so many trails you can build through a glacier or a meadow or a ridgetop before you erode the wilderness feel completely, and it's hard to spread groups out enough on those few trails so that they're not swarming past each other.
Yosemite is popular and began to use mandatory busses. That seems reasonable, though unrelated to the topic of junk website fees.
Buses are one step, but not always enough. Zion for example has mandatory bussing but they still need to do permits for Angel's Landing (if I remember right) and lotteries for the Narrows, especially for the few backpacking campsites in there.
Deep down, that’s what a lot of the critics want a return to. They just won’t say the quiet part out loud.
It's part of the everyday jobs of these agencies to try to maintain that illusion for its visitors, where possible. And part of why it's so hard to do juggle these needs. We could of course tear down more forest and build more parking lots around our parks, then add more paved trails and tramways and escalators to different parts of the park, turning them into amusement parks... but that would defeat the point. It's not easy to balance visitor accessibility with resource protection, especially when so many visitors barely ever step outside of their vehicles to go on the trails, instead tending to horde the most scenic viewpoints at a quick stop.
The NPS was established primarily as an automotive touring network, and were designed as such. Only recently have we started to try to encourage motorists to exit vehicles and actually fan out across the park, but it's not easy. And even that effort eventually backfires, as more and more people DO hit the trails and in turn crowd them, too. At some point lotteries are inevitable. Even designating new parks isn't really a fix, especially since people will horde new parks all at once in its first few years (see Indiana Dunes, which used to be a laid-back state park and then became a major destination because of its new National Park designation).
Don't get me wrong: I think it's awesome that more people are able to participate in our public lands (and in turn develop an appreciation for nature, wilderness, maybe even the climate and conservation, etc.). But it absolutely HAS to be deliberately managed, or our lands will be "loved to death"...
First of all, the question is not whether you’re able to complain about problems. The question is whether popular demand can actually affect change. All sorts of political systems allow you to complain. In fact, there is an argument that a one party system needs to be more responsive to popular demands, since there is no alternative but revolution. In a two party system, one party might listen to your National Park website complaints (and do nothing) and the other party wants to pave over and privatize the Grand Canyon. Hell of a choice, huh?
Further, even if your complaints are heard, it’s an extremely idealized version of how politics works in the US. The reality is there are innumerable examples of monied interests being preferred to popular consensus. And in this case there is a very specific monied interest involved in the corruption. Their only mistake is that they (hopefully) broke the law in the process.
Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.
The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination.
If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.
It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events.
It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition.
These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property
It just seems egregiously expensive.
But in the grand scheme of things, that seems like such a minor technicality. $6 to $15 here or there, a couple times a year on vacation, is way better than the alternative systems that were common before recreation.gov, with faxed lotteries, long delays, and high uncertainty. It used to be common that you'd just have to drive to the place, wait an hour or two in line, pay the admission fee (if you don't have a annual pass), then sign up for some lottery on the spot at like 7am and wait a few hours to hear back. If you don't get it, well, there goes your plans... but you're already there.
By contrast, a small fee here and there for the ahead-of-time guarantee of a reservation is totally worth it. $130,000 to run a lottery system effectively? That's not a whole lot. Even if it costs a few million, nationally, to run them... that's nothing. I can pretty much guarantee you the NPS, USFS, and BLM together wouldn't be able to run a smooth national reservation & lottery system with the same budget and fees. The agencies themselves are so far removed -- in both mission and skill set -- from modern app UX that they probably wouldn't be able to get the job done even with 10x the budget.
I don't doubt that the contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) is a scumbag for pocketing those fees, which are unnecessary to begin with (it's not like it costs $15 in CPU or human processing time to do a change). It'd be great if the public gets those back.
All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the increased costs to the public, because it actually works, vs the chaos that came before it. That website makes public lands FAR more discoverable, accessible, and reliable -- at the cost of minor corruption. I think that is an ultimately acceptable tradeoff, even if it's not ideal. (And it's not like I'm some libertarian; I love our parks and public lands, but digital anything just really isn't their strong suit. I'm grateful they outsourced it.)
Maybe what we need, in lieu of effective federal digital agencies, is some sort of public-FOSS partnership that can take the place of public-private partnerships. But that's much harder for the agencies to deal with than a central commercial entity with designated contacts, support, etc. And the FOSS model isn't really set up to communicate in the real world with the super complicated division of public lands across federal/state/local/agency divides, each with their own little fiefdoms and idiosyncrasies and rules and regulations.
I wonder how other countries manage similar use cases (digital presence for public lands)? Recently went hiking in Taiwan and reserved a trail permit; the UX was terrible even by 90s standards -- at least it was online -- but at least it worked. Not sure how they funded it, but I don't remember there being any fees.
In Austria, when you want to go on a hike, you just go. Sure, there are some popular routes that are crowded, but 99% of our national parks are completely empty. As soon as you can't drive somewhere and it takes a few hours to hike there, it's pretty empty anyway.
Are there so many more hikers in the US, or is this about limiting access to the most popular routes?
Despite being a highway rest area it is illegal to stop there from Memorial Day to Labor Day without a pre-purchased permit. I generally avoid the area during high season so I have no idea how strictly this is enforced should you ever have an urgent need for a toilet.
These days though, even day hiking is increasingly permitted :( I live near the Oregon Cascades, an area that used to be unpermitted but got too popular. A few years ago they introduced a permit system (for both day hikes and overnights), but implemented it terribly... a large % of the permits were released on a single day and were sold out within hours.
People ended up hoarding multiple permits for multiple weekends because they couldn't be sure which weekend they could go (or what the weather would be like), then 40% of the permit holders never showed up on their given reservations... so nobody got to go. They've since tweaked the system.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/16/wilderness-permit-cen...
Your point absolutely stands -- that day hike permits are still largely unusual across the entirety of the US public lands systems -- but more and more places are getting so popular that they do require reservations. It's one of the downsides of social systems like TikTok or Alltrails, which improve discoverability but also focus public attention on the few best trails rather than the thousands of "still pretty good" trails.
Decades past, nobody but the most adventurous would visit these places and reservations were never an issue. Then, with increased visibility/awareness (starting from things like the American Automobile Association magazines, to TripAdvisor, to these days TikTok and Alltrails) visitation kept going up and up and up and up and the lands and agencies couldn't keep up.
This is especially the case with our major parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion) but even smaller places can become an issue with enough social media exposure:
Horseshoe Bend in Arizona: https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/instagram-tourism-booms-hor...
Or Muir Woods just outside of San Francisco: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Wildly-popular-Muir-W...
So places have to try different strategies, including but not limited to lotteries, park-and-ride shuttles, timed reservations, rotating closures, etc. to both enable access but also protect the very resources that people are flocking to see.
It's not just a top-down effort either. There are grassroots NGOs dedicated to trying to balance visitation vs preservation, like Leave No Trace (https://lnt.org/) and the Access Fund (https://www.accessfund.org/).
It's a hard problem all around... you want people to be able to easily enjoy the lands that their tax dollars pay for, but when there are TOO many people (and tourists, both domestic and international)... it gets crazy.
EDIT: I've always wondered why more private companies don't create shared buses to help backpackers hit the entrance to the park. A lot of the times just getting to the entrance is what makes folks use their cars, and if you could park in a nearby town and take a shuttle in and start your backpacking that would go a long way. I know some parks run shuttles inside the park but I'm talking about a more backpacker/cyclist specific transport just to the entrance to minimize impact on the park itself.
Don't they, though? I've seen these at Zion, the Lost Coast, the Cascades, Olympic National Park, etc. And around big cities, often the city/county itself will provide a direct-to-trailhead bus.
No doubt this is sometimes true, but all the permits & reservations I'm aware of in parks are for the hikes themselves, it doesn't matter how you arrived there.
For one thing it generates a lot of profits for both recreation.gov and (somewhat less) the parks. That's unavoidably going to be a motivation for ever more limits and lotteries.
For me that's really soured the idea of going to these places. In the 90s I'd go to any park, show up and hike wherever without any limits, it was great. Now it's hard to be able to ever go, let alone luck into the limited slots.
Some, like the most prominent parts of National Parks, are specifically managed to enable easy access (and also ADA accessibility, like wheelchair-friendly paths). There are also preservation-focused areas, especially but not only Wilderness (our highest form of protection, designated by Congress, prohibits motorized traffic and most buildings, often no use of machines like chainsaws or ATVs, though most will allow pack mules and such). Many multi-use areas (National Forests, BLM land, etc.) also have minimal facilities, often just a dirt lot and maybe a pit toilet if you're lucky. On the other hand, some smaller National Monuments might have no accessible areas EXCEPT for a visitor center and parking lot, usually to protect some extremely limited or fragile resource.
The USA is HUGE and many lands are public and/or protected for various reasons, to different goals. Not every trail is a National Park, and not every National Park is there for hiking or backpacking.
And it's also not merely a matter of land designation. Crowding can happen even in designated wilderness areas, often the result of a place going viral or being in close proximity to a major city or whatever.
> at the cost of minor corruption.
I would hope the government does not adopt "Value Based Pricing," given that we already pay them plenty in taxes. And when we discover corruption, we should kill it.
But it's true, it used to be a lot easier to find space! I'm especially sad that a long-time dream of mine (staying at firewatch tower) seems completely out of reach now. Selfishly, I do yearn for the times when the outdoors were a more exclusive club. But the American (and communitarian) in me recognizes these as public lands, to be shared by all, even if wider access personally inconveniences me. I feel lucky that I got to experience some of these places at all before they blew up... as a millennial, I guess I'm part of that last generation that still knows what it was like pre-internet. Gens Z and beyond may never have that luxury of experiencing a public place that 10,000 TikTokers hadn't already been to... last week.
Side note: And this is exactly how the best places get overcrowded, lol ;)
You actually need the lottery fees not to be refunded, otherwise people will spam the system, knowing they will get their lottery fee returned to them if they are not successful.
The counties here have provided that for at least 30 years and without any 3rd party or paid priority for the non-poor.
So petition your state reps to do it. AZ provides tools for self-service for most common tasks. With the exception of buying a car out of state and wanting to move a vanity plate over a few years ago, I can’t remember the last time I went to the DMV. It helps that our licenses don’t expire until we’re 65, so until my kids need to get their license, I don’t see a need to go back.
My vanity plate - FREEBSD -required an appeal to get to begin with because their system flagged it as a drug reference (free based). I had to _mail_(!) an appeal letter. When I went to transfer it, it was reflagged and they couldn’t even help me at the DMV, and instead of going through the appeal process again I just dropped it.
These days it's all about culture wars and inflation, and no representative cares about day to day services and infrastructure.
You don't have that? The only time I've ever had to visit a DMV office in the decade and a half was upon first moving to the state since they need to take a photo for the new ID and inspect the VIN number on the new registration. There was some sort of ticketing system so even when I got there without an appointment, I didn't have to stand in line long
The online stuff is usually cheaper since its all renewals.
But yes, simple in-state renewals tend to be the easiest, and can often be done online. But things like custom license plates (for an already registered vehicle) or cross-state transfers (when you've been driving for 20+ years) or changing your address or donor status or whatever... can be more difficult than necessary.
But alas, either that never happens because nobody cares (most digital services) or it becomes a political battleground (California vs Texas in education). Sometimes I hate our system of powerful states vs centralized nations...
You hit the nail on the head. We have a trickle down system, where states implement services differently. The reason states don't learn from each other is because of the huge culture war. Texas would rather freeze the state than learn from California, and California would rather pay 20x for public infrastructure than accept a contractor based out of Nevada due to the state's political leanings. It infects every piece of cross-state collaboration and is also why Federal budgetary politics are so acrimonious these days.
I don’t see how improving the status quo and asking/enforcing federal contractors charge reasonable prices should be mutually exclusive.
Even if the contractual approach remained the same (Eg charge lottery fees and use that to pay Booz) presumably the point of this suit is to ensure that Booz are charging only charging a reasonable overhead for their services.
If it turns out their overhead is unreasonable one could either scale the fees down, or scale down Booz’s cut and give the rest to the specific parks for their own use.
I’m not saying I’m for either approach but I still the cost efficiency is orthogonal to how it’s funded.
If it were more transparent how much Booz were making, and how much web traffic, reservations, lottery entries, etc they were dealing with then the reasonable profit overhead for their work could be more easily be understood by the public.
The thing is they aren't contributing to anything but booze allen hamiltons bottom line. None of this money goes into the parks department. Them taking a "reasonable profit overhead" amounts to parasitic loss. There's no magic sauce with web development, plenty of people understand it. This can be done in house at cost just as easily as its done in booze allen hamilton's house.
And figuring out where to go in the park... what's the difference between Plan Your Visit and Things to Do and Places to See? Why is it so hard to get a cohesive map that shows not just where to sleep but also the best places to visit and the recommended driving/hiking routes? What's the difference between a standard map, a brochure map, a simple map, a park map, and a valley map? Why aren't road closures and other alerts reflected on the maps?
Why doesn't the Fees page talk about permit or camping fees at all?
Which areas of the park are reservation-only, which are permitted, which are first-come-first serve?
These are just basic examples I pulled off one site. Most NP sites are like that. And remember this is for Yosemite, one of the country's (if not the world's) most visited tourist destinations, and they couldn't even do basic UX well. This isn't for a lack of knowledge (the on-the-ground rangers are awesome! talk to one next time before you venture forth!), but digital isn't a priority to them. It's not even an afterthought. It's more often than not "oh, I don't know how that works or who works on it or who pays for it".
Before Recreation.gov and ReserveAmerica before it, digital efforts WERE often done in-house, to disastrous effect. Even now, you will usually find better visitor's guides and resources outside of official NPS sites, like on Alltrails or random blogs or "best of" lists.
There is no magic sauce in web development, but it does take a particular type of agency to be able to make good pages with a focus on the end-user. Maybe to you and I such a site is relatively simple to set up. But that is NOT the NPS's strong suit at all, and it would be a forever uphill battle to convince their administrators and the Department of Interior and Congress to focus on usability. I doubt many of them have ever tried to book their own reservation.
Many of their parks don't even run their own restaurants and lodging[1] (which any tourist destination usually would), but you expect them to do well running a multi-agency, multi-site, multi-rule booking system? It's just not practical given the current staffing and skillset.
[1] If you think outsourcing to Booz is bad, yeesh, the hospitality concessionaires like Aramark are even worse. Talk about overpriced and poor quality =/
This is exactly why the private option is just as bad as the apathetic public one: in the end they are the same end result of a less than optimal ui/ux because they come from the same underlying issue of an administration that prefers to either not deal with it appropriately or toss the hot potato to someone else to take the blame of not dealing with it appropriately.
I still stand behind my stance that its not impossible to make a good website in house, and that bringing in outside profiteers is always a mistake compared to hiring those same exact project managers with those same exact visions for the website on an internal basis.
Those exact same project managers probably would never have wanted to work directly for the NPS to begin with, dealing with government clearances and pay scales and bureaucracies for what, maybe half to 70% of their private-sector pay? I'm currently job-hunting for a public-sector web dev job and it's not easy to jump through their hoops, and that's for someone who's purposely seeking them out. Would a less civically-minded PM even bother?
Good web development isn't just about code, but largely culture, a sort of user-focused product culture that's hard enough to find in tech proper, harder still in government. Congress doesn't even THINK about these issues, much less try to put out good requirements for them. It's easier for them to sign a check (or a rent-seeking agreement) than to spin up what would basically amount to a new digital agency from scratch (which I actually think would be a great idea, like what the United States Digital Service is tasked with)... but that takes time to get off the ground. In the meantime Recreation.gov (and ReserveAmerica before it) have served the public well for the last decade or so, at the expense of some minor taxpayer dollars -- still much more bang for the buck than we get out of a typical war or panicked pandemic response, or housing Secret Service agents at private resorts or whatever.
If and when our government improves, then yes, we should in-house essential and basic services like web development. But our government doesn't seem to be improving on that front, and efforts to push it forward (like a Green New Deal) faltered. The current administration did manage to push through a lot of infrastructure dollars, but it remains to be seen whether that'll pay off (and whether it can survive the next Republican administration). Fingers crossed... but until then, god damn it, let me have my easily reserved campsites, please, if only so I can get away once in a while without having to think about how shitty the government is!
Instead of 50 states all having separate DMV offices, all too small for a decent website, now it is just one office double the size with a small web dev team. That should be substantially better and cheaper.
Same for the forest service.
For a festival, though, I imagine it could be handled similarly to hotel rooms... block off a certain # of sites for the exclusive use of some "XYZFEST23" coupon code or similar. Not sure if recreation.gov actually supports that, but it's not an insurmountable problem.
It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a public resource.
> or to just disappear forever into the coffers of bureaucrats and their cronies with nothing to show for it?
It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to bid for future government contracts.
The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts, always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed. And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.
The post you're responding to isn't saying these things are good, but it's taking the practical perspective that the current system is better than what existed before and probably better than what the government would produce itself.
It's easy to say that we shouldn't accept involving corporations in this way, and it's easy to say bureaucratic waste/theft should be punished. I think most people here would agree with you in a theoretical perspective.
The problem is that we have to deal with the constraints of the real world, which the parent post addresses and you ignore. I'd invite you not to ignore them and just criticize, and instead to propose a solution - what do you think is the right way to allocate usage of national parks and related service that does not involve private corporations and also avoids bureaucratic waste?
I think it's more a matter of picking your battles. What are the things that our government does poorly, which should be handled better? Let's see... education, healthcare, science and arts funding, housing, wars, surveillance, immigration, highways and bridges, Amtrak...
It's hard enough to improve (for example) local transit, petitioning a dozen people across 1-3 agencies for a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of improvements. But to try to get Congress to implement a system affecting thousands of sites across all 50 states, across the NPS, USFS, USFWS, BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, etc... where do you even start with such a thing? Of all the letter, protests, petitions, voicemails, public meetings, etc. I've experienced, I've never once received a meaningful reply (much less actual positive change) from any politician higher than city-level. Our governments are just not set up to be responsive to regular citizens. You have to have a shit ton of money or power to matter at all.
When even organized nonprofits with established lobbies struggle with this -- a lot -- what is the average citizen supposed to do? Our lack of meaningful representation is a major systemic flaw of our so-called democracy, not something some rando on HN can single-handedly solve (unless, maybe, you're one of the major tech CEOs on here... hey Vercel or Cloudflare, wanna help us make a better reservation system and forever earn public gratitude? lol)
> It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to bid for future government contracts.
Is it that black and white? Recreation.gov isn't the failure that (say) Healthcare.gov or WhiteHouse.com (the petition site) was. In fact it works very well. And from the news article, apparently the lottery fees were supposed to pay for most of the website in lieu of an upfront fee (though there's some question about a questionable $120 million fee).
In terms of government digital efforts, honestly, this is probably the best one I've ever seen. Can't remember the last time it broke or crashed, and I've made dozens of reservations through it smoothly. And the cost to me... maybe $20/year?
> The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts, always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed.
Agreed. Part of our election cycles and extreme partisanship politics =/ Day to day services get deprioritized vs hot-button issues.
> And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.
I think a reasonable fix would to be just renegotiate the fees and give a larger portion to the parks, while still trickling some % to the contractor. Maybe open it up to a bidding process. But frankly I think this contractor is doing a much better job than the government itself could. The feds are terrible at making functional websites. Obama started some efforts and Biden is continuing them (Login.gov, the TSA systems) but they're still not very seamless. It's just not a part of their culture. Maybe that will change in time, but until then, I'd rather have an expensive but functional service than some ideologically purer but unusable system.
I don't think this was an improvement. It has led to fewer people being able to use the campsites, as they are easily and cheaply reserved. Thus, people who have plenty of money to spare reserve them on the off-chance of wanting to use it that day. But when that day comes, they don't show up.
Also in many places the camping fee itself is already steep.
In general it seems with runaway wealth inequality we need an easy way to set fees and fines as a % of ability-to-pay (i.e. equalized pain-of-payment). We also need this for parking and traffic violations, for example.
Prompt access to government services should not require extra payment. Because then you're providing them an incentive to further kneecap the system. Hypothetically, imagine if this figure (20%) was now 2000%. Would that be fair? I'm sure some people would be able to pay that sum for processing in minutes, while the rest of us have to wait several hours.
A AAA membership in California does this for you for some things. Zero wait to register a purchased vehicle in silicon valley, possibly Mountain View I don't remember it's been a couple of years.
On the other hand I look like an axe murderer on my CA drivers license as the convoluted process took three hours and required starting over twice due to mistakes by the clerks.
I've had no-appointment things get done in 5 minutes as a walkup, and also 3-hour waits despite having an appointment. Total crapshoot =/
Then I tried had to do the same thing in Oregon a few years later. That took one person about 20 minutes to finish.
It's just crazy how much variance there is between states & offices.
I can't tell if this is a reference to AAA or you're not aware of it? That's basically what the AAA membership gets you.
But at least in California, the DMV these days directly supports doing all the common things online so I haven't had a AAA membership in a long time nor have I had to go in person to the DMV in a long time.
It becomes a problem when people take the attitude that what’s done is done. The fees should be refunded, at least from the consultants back into the public purse, and they should take much greater precautions when it comes to “public private partnerships” and monetizing access to public land.
The details from the article that stand out to me:
* The US Government paid nothing for Recreation.gov, and the site is instead funded by fees charged on the platform, that are passed through to the site's operator, Booz Allen
* The amount generated by those fees and paid to Booz Allen is not publically disclosed.
* There are times when government agencies (like the NPS) offer free tickets (aka, timed entry to popular national parks), and Booz Allen still tacks on a fee.
* Similarly, when you enter a nonrefundable lottery for popular permits (climbing Mt. Whitney, rafting the Salmon, etc.) the $6 fee you pay to enter doesn't go to, say, conservation efforts in those areas, but goes straight to Booz Allen.
On princple, I don't mind user-fees being attached to some activities in public lands. But this payment structure seems designed to defraud the American public. Certainly, the contractor is providing value by delivering online reservation systems, and that costs money, but they should not be incentivized to charge fees that go to them, not the public lands.
I hope the lawsuit succeeds in gaining class action status, and prevents other government websites from being structured this way.
There are literally millions of places you can camp and recreated for free on public lands in the United States. When the fees do exist, they're for particularly popular areas (National Parks) or cost-intensive uses (campgrounds where you can plug in your RV or take a hot shower).
Campground fees of between $5-30/night are hardly making public lands a "playground for the rich." Same for the $80 (cheaper for seniors, and free for the disabled or veterans) annual pass that'll get you and your family into every National Park into the country, as well as any other federally managed public lands that charge an entry fee.
There are certainly important issues[1] about equity in access to public lands, but we're pretty far from your "plaground for the rich" scenario.
The website is basically a scam because you can't enter if you don't have a pass. But buying a pass doesn't guarantee access. I can't make a reservation either, I have to get there in line (after buying the pass online) and hope I can get early enough before the park is 'full'. This basically means the park is off limits.
Looking back earlier this year I paid $40 for two cave tours of a national park through the site. There are no listed fees. It is a reasonable price for the tour and the site was pretty easy to use, but now I am curious what the cut is for the park. Definitely am not against a private company getting paid to manage reservations but seems reasonable that the info is disclosed.
To put it another way, they could pay a $40 fee or lose $100 by doing nothing. Most people would rather pay the fee and get their $60 back.
Not surprisingly, this is also the exact model that hotels use...
Separate frustration: needing a timed-entry permit for everything. It used to be you could wake up, glance at the sky and check the weather and decide where you're going and how far you might want to go. Now you have to hover over the computer days in advance, or refresh at just the right time to book a spot because certain time windows for entry haven't been released on the website yet, and won't be available to book until the day prior at a specific time.
And if the weather is bad on the day, you're probably out of luck for the next few days, and potentially the next week if you didn't think ahead and buy permits for any other days you might want to go.
I gave up on trying to get camping reservations altogether. They were gone within minutes of release.
recreation.gov has some benefits – they've improved usability. The fees are punitive and obscure. Also there's lots of corruption and scalping on the site that they are not taking responsibility for.
He wrote an article calling out this situation with recreation.gov about a year ago
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-booz-allen-renting...
- Several states/counties/cities/etc add a surcharge for credit card payments or transaction/processing fees for things like vehicle registration, paying traffic tickets, obtaining court records, paying property tax, etc.
- Prisons and jails are really terrible with junk fees for both the prisoners and for systems set up for their friends/families to call or message them, send them food/sundries, etc. They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system.
You could say well I don’t know how Ticketmaster absorbing all competitors and becoming a defacto monopoly and charging 30% fees to the buyer and 30% fees to the booker and is rampant corruption since they’re just passing on credit card processing fees.
Sounds like the meal plan at my kid's college. Unsurprising that they pattern their systems after those used to manage prisoners?
https://www.marklogic.com/blog/oracle-oregon-lawsuit/
But, Oracle got it anyway.
Imagine if the dozens of Perl programmers had $240M and had recycled all that money back into the local economy.
Could it have gone any worse even if that exchange was rewritten in Perl 6?
The problem that most bugs me is how often reservations for popular campsites fill up the moment they become available. And then when you go camping, there are often empty sites. It's so cheap to reserve campsites, and you have to do it so far in advance, people reserve campsites they aren't sure they want, cancel their plans later, and don't even bother to inform the campgrounds.
Pinnacles is not too bad a divergence, though - worse is Point Reyes, where a campsite costs $30 a night, but it's very close to San Francisco, and a hotel room would certainly cost hundreds of dollars a night. And Point Reyes is terrible for people reserving spots that they don't end up using.
Virginia Eastern District Court Case # 1:23-cv-00043
I’m not familiar with any ways to get free access
https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/47432813/Wilson_et_...
You'll eat up 300 pages pretty quickly - there's roughly 20 filings between now and March 10 which I'm guessing is around when this article came out, probably too many pages to fit under the free limit but then again a lot of the activity isn't very interesting.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66718284/wilson-v-booz-...
Beyond that as another poster noted, you'd have to buy the additional files via PACER.
What difficulties would there be from the government's perspective, what issues would the companies experience when trying to create the interfaces and portals, and what issues would pop up for the users of the services?
This solution didn't need any investment from the USG.
However as soon as you start asking people for money (for reservations) then it becomes a big fraud risk if the UI isn’t on a known same domain (such as something.gov).
> Development of the website's interface as well as its supporting back-end services, to make sure that the website could work to help people compare between health insurance plans, were both outsourced to private companies. The front-end of the website was developed by the startup Development Seed. The back-end work was contracted out to CGI Federal Inc., a subsidiary of the Canadian IT Multinational corporation| CGI Group, which subcontracted the work to other companies, as is common on large government contracts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthCare.gov
This is particularly sad to me because this kind of thing should probably be a core competency of a modern government. The novel Jennifer Government lied to me :(
walk in the park
"Oh, we reserved it... in December"
Fucking WILD that these camp sites are selling out like miley cyrus tickets. Really annoying!
I was sloppy with my comment: when I say "take ownership", I meant over providing the service to the public (ie the responsibility), not the code itself. My apologies!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...