How many amenities should national park campgrounds offer? Fruita Campground, Capitol Reef National Park/Kurt Repanshek file

How do you like your national park campground? Wish there was WiFi so you could stay abreast of news or sports? Want a food truck to show up so you didn't have to cook over a camp stove? Is there a need for hot and cold water showers in each and every campground in the National Park System? 

A two-page list (attached below) of recommended improvements to park campgrounds calls for some of those changes, though it remains to be seen how fully Interior Secretary David Bernhardt embraces the suggestions.

Drafted by Interior's Subcommittee on Recreation Enhancement Through Reorganization, the document also suggests that holders of the National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Senior Pass, an $80 lifetime pass those 62 and older can buy and which provides a 50 percent discount on campground fees, face some blackout dates during busy seasons that would prevent them from that discount. It also recommends that perhaps national park campgrounds should offer cabins for nightly rental, and maybe a tent rental pool as well.

While many campgrounds suffer from deferred maintenance, the draft suggests that concessionaires be encouraged to tackle some of the needs by ensuring they would be repaid by subsequent concessionaires if they ever lost, or surrendered, the campground management contract.

"We're looking at a couple things," said Derrick Crandall, the former president of the American Recreation Coalition who now holds the same title at Outdoor Solutions USA, when asked about the impetus behind the draft plan. "No. 1, we actually have fewer campsites now than we had 30 years ago. And a lot of the reason for that is not by plan, it's because water treatment plants and other kinds of infrastructure have deteriorated and we've seen (campground) closures.

"It is absolutely true that most Park Service campgrounds are ill-prepared to deal with the larger RVs. I don't think that we should be building all of our campgrounds to accommodate 42-foot diesel pushers that are towing a car," he continued during a phone call Friday. "I'm not an advocate for that. I think we need some capacity. I'm more concerned about the fact that we see demand in many national parks for group camping. Where we have extended families to accommodate people who just camp differently than we camp.

"In some cases I think we can do that, so whether it's for a scout troop or whether it's a family reunion of largely Latino and others who are seeking that, I think we need to figure out a way to be able to understand what the current demand is and to have a system in place that tries to accommodate some of this demand."

The increasing length of RVs, with secondary vehicles in tow, have some calling for larger campsites in national park campgrounds/NPS

There are many campgrounds across the National Park System that already are operated by private companies, as opposed to Park Service staff. And the Trump administration doesn't seem averse to expanding that practice. President Trump's first Interior secretary, Ryan Zinke, told a gathering of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association back in 2017 that, "As the secretary, I don't want to be in the business of running campgrounds. My folks will never be as good as you are."

Going a step further, Zinke added that, "We'll be looking at where our employees should be spending their time. ... Yes, cleaning the bathrooms. But actually running services, that's something we should be pushing to somebody who's updated and knows the market better."

The subcommittee's recommendations don't call for a wholesale turnover of park campgrounds to private operators. But it does propose a pilot program of five to 10 campgrounds in the system for "modernization, enhancement or even new construction, especially in park units with low levels of visitor services that now limit public use. The incentive would be an allocation of funds equal to current deferred maintenance, but available for discretionary use to improve the campground and associated infrastructure."

The plan was knocked down by Sierra Club officials, who said it would be another step toward pricing some Americans out of the National Park System.

"Turning our national parks into profit centers for a select few vendors would rob our public lands of just what makes them special. Hiking fees and limiting discounts for seniors will shut out working families and elders on fixed incomes," said Joel Pannell, associate director of Sierra Club Outdoors for All. "We will not allow the embattled Trump administration to turn our national parks into playgrounds for the wealthy and privileged, or permit companies that financially support the Trump campaign to profit from privatization of our public lands. Park lovers and outdoor advocates across the nation will rise up in resistance.”

The campground suggestions come at a time when, according to Kampgrounds of America's 2019 North American Camping Report, park visitors younger than Baby Boomers want more amenities with their campfires.

Even though only 5 percent of campers use the presence of on-site recreation as a determinant of campground selection, when asked to rate the importance of on-site recreation and the campground’s proximity to local cultural events and attractions in selecting campgrounds, about 4 in 10 camping households view these as important considerations.

On-site recreation grew in importance across all age groups in 2018. About 40 percent of millennials and Gen Xers listed on-site recreation as an important factor in their camping experience, with 37 percent of Baby Boomers and 34 percent of Mature campers in agreement.

Once they’re at the campground, clean bathrooms has consistently been the most important factor for campers while staying at a campground (averaging nearly 50 percent since 2014). The second tier of factors include allowing pets (up 4 percentage points since 2014 to 23 percent); being kid friendly (21 percent); and offering recreational activities (20 percent). Interestingly, the importance of free WiFi connectivity has dropped 3 percentage points since 2014, with a 2018 rating of 16 percent.

"I do know absolutely that today's campers are more urban in background than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and in many cases are looking for greater support," Crandall said. "They do want WiFi. They do want some food options. What we're saying is we think there is a strategy to deal with providing food in a campground as opposed to telling people that they basically have to go out of a park to a gateway community to find dinner and come back."

Are the days when most campers pitched a tent and cooked their own meals passing national parks by?/Kurt Repanshek file

Crandall said park superintendents have told him that "part of the traffic congestion (in parks) is caused by people who need things, whether it's just a camp store kind of operation, just basic camp supplies that people who are novices in the outdoors don't know about because they're not aware that there's going to be a drop in the temperature down to 25 degrees in August in a campground."

The KOA report also claimed a decline in national park campers.

Campers continue to be reliant on public lands for their camping trips. About six in ten camper nights is spent on public lands or in public campgrounds.

While the proportion of camper nights spent at both state and national parks is near 2017 levels, there has been a proportional drop in camper nights in national parks since 2016, suggesting that as campers spend more time camping, they are devoting those additional camper nights to different locations (e.g. public & private land outside of campgrounds).

The overall proportion of camping in national parks and state parks has declined since 2015.

The subcommittee's report alludes to those trends in calling for greater investment in national park campgrounds, through private businesses.

There is also broad consensus that the current national park campground system, largely operated by federal employees, combines inadequate and outmoded visitor infrastructure and a need for both capital and operating subsidies with appropriated funds. Overall capacity has not kept up with growth and changes in camping demand, and the infrastructure that does exist, with few exceptions, fails to meet expectations of the contemporary camping market. National park campgrounds are also the victims of other park infrastructure problems, including roads and water systems. In addition to adverse impacts on visitor experiences, the challenges facing campgrounds make the system an underperforming asset.

... As a serendipity, private sector operation of the campgrounds would generate a dramatic increase in NPS awareness of visitor characteristics and satisfaction. The lessons learned with near-immediate operational changes in national parks can be then replicated for other Interior bureaus, including the Bureau of Land Management, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and , cooperatively, on American Indian lands.

The recommendations made by the subcommittee also included a call for a "national charrette" involving experts from the private sector as well as state and national campground operators and relevant federal officials to pull together "a centralized library of information, trends, and best practices" that can be reviewed and used to build an approach to upgrading campgrounds on federal lands.

It also suggests arriving at campground models and the use of "categorial permissions" that would allow construction of utility systems, for example, without the need to go through full-blown NEPA analysis.

Pricing for campsites should be adjusted regularly for inflation and offered options, such as WiFi and RV hookups, the document said, and campground franchise fees -- the percentage of revenues operators agree to return to the Park Service -- should be used for "needed and appropriate NPS services, including education/interpretation, fire, and safety and related."