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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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @02:29AM (1 child)
Is it that hard to prepare and vote in a bill to have basic funding for essential services always?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @02:59AM
This has been true for 25+ years. They can shut down the government to make the other side look bad, and play a game of economic chicken to see which side's polling numbers drop faster. If it is a weak majority or minority they may be able to defect just enough people from the other side to win their victory and then get more voters for their party in the next election on the 'strength' of their party's stand.
America has been doing these sorts of political machinations since the Articles of Confederacy (the Constitution wasn't until the 1780s, I forget the exact date.) Unfair taxation started in the mid-late 1780s under Washington held steady for most of the 19th century, then sharply rose at the beginning of the 20th century with income tax, the feds, and a variety of other taxes becoming the norms, until reaching the levels they are today between the 1950s and now.