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Private Companies Are Paying To Keep Trails Groomed, Bathrooms Cleaned In Yellowstone

posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 14 2019, @05:10PM   
from the business-as-unusual dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes in with this tidbit from NPR:

Two weeks into the government shutdown, National Parks are starting to close. The public has been getting free access, since there are no employees to collect entrance fees of up to $35 per car. But neither are employees there to collect trash and clean bathrooms. So, with overflowing trash cans and toilets posing a threat to human health and safety, parks are shutting down.

But in the nation's oldest national park, Yellowstone, local businesses are pitching in to pay park staff to keep it open — or at least parts of it.

[...] Jerry Johnson owns a business that rents snowmobiles and sends seven guided tours a day into Yellowstone in the winter. He calls it 'the trip of a lifetime.' When the shutdown began, he received a big spike in phone calls from people who had already booked trips, and he didn't want to tell them their Yellowstone adventure was cancelled because politicians in Washington D.C. couldn't resolve their differences.

[...] "If you don't groom," explained Johnson, "the trails will get very rough, and you get bumps, moguls, in them, and it'll be — it's just miserable."
So, during the shutdown, private businesses that operate inside the park are picking up the tab — about $7,500 dollars a day to groom Yellowstone's 300-plus miles of snow-covered roads, and to keep one paved road open to cars. Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which runs the only hotels operating inside the park in winter, is paying most of that — paying park service employees to perform the same grooming duties they do under normal circumstances.

Xanterra asked the 13 guide services that operate in the park to chip in to help pay, and all of them did. It adds up to about 300 bucks a day for each of the guide services.

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Original Submission

• Re:Theyre only doing this to make money (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 15 2019, @01:34AM

  by khallow (3766) on Tuesday January 15 2019, @01:34AM (#786736) Journal

  1. Keep the sociopath leaders too scared to try any crap, and as far as possible, make sure companies are run by people who are not sociopaths.

  Who again has the power to generate this fear? It's not going to be the clueless public. It'll be some other group of sociopathic leaders who by the nature of the above shift will be even less accountable for their actions than the alleged sociopathic business leaders were.

  2. Instill, or more like restore, a sense of civic duty among business leaders.

  You're not even trying.

  When people dismiss bad behavior as somehow expected, even think it's what companies are supposed to do, that there is no other purpose in corporate life than the almighty profit, and that there's nothing anyone can do about it, no one can change it, we empower the bad behavior. If the people cared to, if we could all agree to pull together, we could instantly terminate any business. A total boycott will kill any business no matter how big. Same with a strike.

  Let us keep in mind that a lot of the supposed bad behavior isn't even bad, like firing people who are bad workers or paying people less than they would like to be paid.

  Of course, these days, a business has to really epically screw up to turn the public against them. Even polluting the entire Gulf of Mexico isn't enough to earn a corporate death sentence.

  And what's the problem supposed to be here? BP for example screwed up bad with Deepwater Horizon, but it paid for that. The only disagreement, as far as I've heard, is a mercenary disagreement about whether the fines and clean up costs were high enough or not.

  Parent