National Park Service funding vs. crony profit, a Dry Torugas example

Happy National Park Service Founders Day for those who celebrate. This commemorates the signing of a law by the third most notorious racist ever to serve in the White House (Prof. Dr. Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D.; the #1 racist, of course, being Donald Trump and #2 being slaveholder George Washington).

Dry Tortugas National Park is one of three in Florida. It costs $15 per person to enter or $0 if the visitor has already purchased an annual pass ($80 for US residents; $250 for rich foreign visitors), consistent with almost 90 percent of National Park Service funding coming from federal taxpayers in general, many of whom are too busy working to pay their taxes (top income tax rates being over 50% in California and NYC) in order to visit any park.

What about the favored companies (cronies) whom the NPS has put into a monopoly position with respect to park access? A single seaplane company is authorized to fly people into the park, a 40-minute trip for 70 statute miles in a slow airplane. They’re able to charge $910 for a day trip:

The National Park collects either 0% of the revenue (visitor already holds an annual pass) or 1.6% of the revenue ($15 out of $925). Let’s call it an average of 0.8% plus whatever percentage of revenue the seaplane operator got for its monopoly.

There is also a ferry (the Yankee Freedom; the crony that operates this trip is Maskachusett-based). It costs $245 round-trip for 175 passengers. So the boat company gets roughly $43,000 in revenue per day (it’s a four-hour round trip) and the Park gets perhaps $1,000 from entrance fees ($15 per passenger, but $0 for the presumed majority who have an annual pass). That’s just over 2% of the revenue from owning the asset that people have traveled to see and, in most cases, paid about $400/night for a hotel in Key West.

At least at one time, the ferry company was required to hand over 8.5% of ticket price to the NPS, but both authorized transportation providers are usually sold out, often months in advance, so the above-cited prices aren’t the market-clearing prices, perhaps because they must be approved by the NPS. If the NPS were interested in getting more from visitors and taking less from taxpayers, it could trivially insist on a much larger share of the daily price either via fees or in exchange for handing out these transportation monopolies.

(Finally, note that “Freedom” is the name of the boat operated by the company that won the right to exclude all competitors from this market.)