Parking problems

PALMER — Officials with Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources and a contractor who manages the Matanuska Lake campground and daily parking area are “discussing” the parking fee system for that park, state officials and the contractor said this week. Meanwhile, the park’s parking lot, as well as the parking lot for the Long Lake trailhead, also managed by the contractor, are closed for the season for the first time in several years.

Rumors circulated this week on local Facebook hiking groups that officials with Big Holiday Campgrounds, which manages the park for the state, are looking to no longer accept the state’s annual park pass and instead charge $200 for an annual pass of their own. Annual state park passes cost $50.

Those rumors, said Holly Petersen, Big Holiday’s owner, are not entirely true. Although her company has been in discussions with the state over the park’s fees and the pass system “for the last several years,” no decision has been made and that dollar amount has not been proposed, she said.

“That’s a decision the state of Alaska has to make,” she said.

Petersen said she was emailed by state officials asking what would be required to keep the park open over the winter. State officials said they do not expect an “imminent decision” on the park’s fee structure. Even with the gate closed and the bathrooms locked, the park is still accessible through both Crevasse Moraine and the University of Alaska’s nearby experimental farm.

Big Holiday Campgrounds, which manages the park for the state, currently charges $7 for a day parking pass and $25 for a camp site, according to a state website. Users who hold the state’s $50 annual parks pass do not pay the daily fee. About 40 percent of visitors to those parks use that annual pass, she said.

The company’s problem at Matanuska Lake, and the decision to close for the season the parking areas of it and nearby Long Lake, stem from a combination of park contractors’ income model, the state pass system and a high amount of vandalism and theft at those parks, Petersen said.

Big Holiday and other companies like it rely on fees placed into the brown “iron ranger” boxes at parks to help meet their bottom line, Petersen said. Rather than be paid by the state, the company makes a profit from whatever is left over from those fees after staff is paid and park maintenance done. That means if users aren’t depositing fees in the self-serve boxes, the company can’t turn a profit.

The high use of the state pass at the park, combined with a parade of scofflaws who simply ignore the fee system, means that fewer people are putting fees in the box and the company is making less money to cover its costs, Petersen said. Her staff can place fee envelopes on car windows, but can’t enforce payment. And if law enforcement officials issue tickets for non-payments, the fees from those tickets goes to the state’s general fund, not the park’s contractor.

“I’ve actually seen people walk up, take an envelope, take it back to their car, put the tag on their dashboard and leave the envelope in the car,” she said. “They are going over, they obviously know they are supposed to pay, and they obviously know that we aren’t going to do anything about it.”

The park’s parking area annually closed over the winter under the previous contractor, she said. When Big Holiday took over the contract several years ago, they were able to keep it open year round. In 2014 they raised daily fees from $5 to $7, she said, the first time fees had gone up since the 1980s.

Now, thanks to an uptick in vandalism, which Petersen blames on SB-91, a state law that eliminates or reduces jail time for many crimes, the park needs a staff member watching the park anytime it is open, she said. Alaska winter also requires that she hire someone to plow the road and parking area. Those costs add up, and the combination of more crime and fewer people paying the fees means that keeping the gate open all year is no longer financially viable.

“I’d be lying if I said I have gone into that park and literally been reduced to tears because I was so angry about what I found,” she said. “When we removed the host from the campground there were so many needles that you wouldn’t have wanted to let your kids out. And then we have our share of thieves, and it makes keeping that facility open year round next to impossible for a private company. If you don’t have any income, it’s hard to pay the snow plow guy.”