RALEIGH – When I wrote last month in praise of the structure and financing of South Carolina’s park system, I figured that my mailbox and inbox would fill up with angry retorts and patriotic defenses of North Carolina’s unique approach to parks management.
I was right. Some boosters of the North Carolina parks questioned my intelligence. Others questioned my intentions. I have no intention of insulting their intelligence, so I’ll leave their names out of it.
Other boosters were more respectful, offering to take me on a tour of their favorite parks and historic sites to educate me about North Carolina’s superior offerings. I may well take some of them up on their offers, because I really do enjoy traversing the highways and byways of my home state and discovering interesting new places.
But my argument for South Carolina’s approach to parks management – which makes greater use of user fees, private donations, and business-like marketing practices – wasn’t based on a lack of appreciation of North Carolina’s hidden treasures. I already appreciate them.
What I really want is for more North Carolinians to appreciate them as much as I do, while making sure that those state taxpayers whose interests will never include the likes of hiking, playing water sports, or touring historic sites aren’t forced to pay the bill for other people’s hobbies or vacations.
As it happens, the idea of introducing more user fees and private management practices to the state park system is hardly a unique one. In the August issue of Governing, the establishment magazine serving state and local officials, reporter Linda Baker describes how state park systems across the country are responding to budget pressures and economic recession by raising admission fees, operating more efficiently, and employing corporate sponsorships and other public-private partnerships.
Not everyone likes the trend. And not every deal between park systems and private donors, sponsors, or buyers is worth making. Still, I think the general direction is promising. I was particularly intrigued by Baker’s description of developments in another North Carolina neighbor, the state of Georgia:
“We have restructured our entire agency to become more business focused,” says Becky Kelley, director of Georgia State Parks, where state funding plummeted from $24 million in 2010 to $10 million this year. That restructuring entailed laying off staff, exploring the transfer of lodge operations to private concessionaires, and more recently, exploring corporate sponsorships. “We are transitioning from parks stewardship managers to parks business managers,” Kelley says. “It’s a major paradigm shift.”
It’s also a difficult one. For decades, states assembled and operated their park systems within an older paradigm that recognized no logical connection between using the parks and paying for them. Officials either operated under a hazy assumption that most taxpayers were also regular parks users – which was never true – or they thought nothing of forcing taxpayers to subsidize the enjoyment of the minority of state residents who made significant use of the facilities.
That paradigm should have shifted a long time ago, on fairness grounds alone. It didn’t. It took the fiscal and economic realities of the Great Recession to accomplish the shift.
Whatever the cause, it remains the case that North Carolina policymakers now have both an opportunity and a responsibility to rethink how state parks and historic sites are financed, operated, and marketed.
Pretending that North Carolina has nothing to learn from South Carolina, Georgia, and other states is unhelpful, but not surprising. As I’ve observed many times, North Carolina’s claim to be a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit was always more of a marketing slogan than a realistic observation – and was itself a bit of a conceit, if you think about it.
Let’s have less conceit and more consideration.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.