Money Trees

Introduction

In Washington state, it's almost reservation season. Federal campsites in the Pacific Northwest, like Kalaloch on the Pacific Coast or Beaver Creek on Priest Lake in the Idaho Panhandle, are reserved on a 6-month rolling basis, so if you want to camp in July and August, you better be at your computer in January and February. Also,

• February 15, the lottery for an Enchantments Permit opens.
• February 21 begins the lottery for Mount Rainier Wilderness and Climbing Permits
• April 1 starts a monthly release of availability for Mount Margaret Backcountry permits.
• April 15 at 7:00 a.m., backpacking hopefuls can try to secure a reservation for The Enchanted Valley or Cape Alava as part of the Olympic National Park Wilderness Permit

If you're like me, a knot manifests in your stomach every winter that feeds off the imagination of backpacking or camping trips with friends and family. However, the knot also feeds off nerves—worries that I won't win the Wonderland Trail lottery and won't click fast enough to reserve my favorite site or backpacking camp on recreation.gov.

Regardless, I shouldn't be too upset since I've been fortunate to visit most of the places I've listed above. Furthermore, even if I don't win the lottery for the Enchantments or the Wonderland Trail, I can look at my lottery application as a donation to help maintain the beautiful places I love.

Wrong.

To my surprise, and to the surprise of probably every other person who has ever used recreation.gov, that lottery application fee goes to Booz Allen's bottom line, the Washington D.C. consulting firm behind recreation.gov.

Getting Out, so Booz Allen Can Cash In

In 2017, Booz Allen was awarded a contract worth $182 million to build recreaction.gov. A marketing page on their website, bragging about how good of a job they have done (although the N.Y. Times would disagree), states that:

Recreation.gov was an investment for Booz Allen, designed collaboratively with participating agencies, but at no cost to the federal government. Instead of a traditional cost structure, the unique contractual agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact. This is a true public-private partnership—it uses no government money.

That's an incredible statement. I'll highlight my favorite part of it.

"Instead of a traditional cost structure, the unique contractual agreement is a transaction-based fee model that lets the government and Booz Allen share in risk, reward, results, and impact."

I'll provide a loose translation, "Instead of the government taking tax payer dollars to pay Booz Allen, they gave Booz Allen the ability to tax the U.S. population to use their own parks."

If I want to reserve a backpacking trip itinerary on the Wonderland Trail, win an overnight camping permit in the Enchantments, or spend a night deep in Olympic National Park at The Enchanted Valley, Booz Allen can tax me for it in the form of non-refundable lottery and reservation fees that they get to set.

Who could have a problem paying taxes, recreation fees, AND Booz Allen website fees?

The Full(er) Story

This story crossed my path when I was listening to Matt Stoller on Breaking Points and reading his Substack article on the same topic (I recommend viewing and reading both.)

Stoller summarizes his article at the top:

Today I'm writing about how the giant government contracting firm Booz Allen and 13 government agencies have been renting back to the public access to our own lands by forcing us to pay junk fees to use national parks.

It's an informative and researched piece that begins with a brief history of 19th-century philosophies that can help us understand how corporations ended up in and out of national parks. It also points out the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which gives permanent authority to government agencies to charge fees for the use of public lands.

Then, it pinpoints Booz Allen's start as a digital government contractor before trying to explain how much money the company was given to start the project and how much it makes. Stoller borrows the Mt. Whitney hiking lottery as an example to demonstrate that in one lottery, the gross income can be over $100,000.

I'll do him one better. The forest service published its Enchantments lottery data for 2022. The Enchantments are a series of zones in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in Washington state. The lottery and reservation system for the area is managed on recreation.gov. The PDF data file has 646 pages, with 56 entries per page, and each person paid $6 (one of those people was me). Therefore, we can assume that recreation.gov grossed over $200,000 last year on this lottery alone.

Interestingly, he tells the story of Thomas Kotab, who sued the Bureau of Land Management in 2020 and won in court over the $2 junk fee he had to pay to access the Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area.

At the end of the article, Stoller concludes that although Booz Allen is charging junk fees and ripping us off, we have amazing public lands, Americans to stand up for them like Thomas Kotab, a government to protect them; and in 2023, he writes, "The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act authorization runs out [...] which means that Congress has to renew it. Hopefully, an interested member of Congress who loves Federal lands could actually tighten the definitions here, and find a way to stop Booz Allen and these 13 government agencies from engaging in this minor theft via junk fees."

What's Next?

Following Stoller's hopes, that interested member of Congress steps—or is prodded—forward. And they are joined by a few others that help rid our public lands of deception, where many people are wrong in thinking the (unregulated) fees they pay are justified in maintaining the parks.

Alternatively, you could take the investment advice of Zacks, which currently rates BAH as a BUY. No doubt influenced by the fact that the stock is up 25% in the last year.