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Park visitors soon will be able to pay their way in on credit
by Michael
Doyle
The Fresno Bee, December 19, 2001
WASHINGTON-Visitors entering Yosemite National Park can soon start paying with credit cards as the popular tourist draw becomes more creative in how it collects money.
Entrance station ATM-like machines may follow at other parks and national forests. It's all part of a federal effort to modernize the collection of entrance fees that have been fattening the treasuries of the most popular parks.
And it's coming none too soon for federal auditors, who complain that most parks and forests remain frustratingly dated in how they collect money.
This is no small concern, when about 3.5 million visitors enter Yosemite annually.
"Most sites have not adopted . . . common retailing techniques," the General Accounting Office notes in a newly published report.
"Such techniques would increase visitor convenience by providing more payment options and improve the safety and security of the employees collecting the fees."
Unhappy GAO auditors reported finding that 70% of federal parks and recreation sites visited - "including some large national parks that host millions of visitors annually" - do not accept credit cards for payments of entrance fees.
Though the auditors initially cited Yosemite among the lag-gards, park officials hope they'll have credit card machines at the park's entrances by next spring
"We're looking at it as a visitor's service," Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said Tuesday. "In this day and age, with travelers being advised not to carry cash, a lot of people come to the entrance station and just assume we take credit cards."
Patterns to get scrutiny
Yosemite officials also hope the new "card-swipe" machines will permit more detailed tracking of park visitation patterns.
At the entrance to Sequoia National Park, officials likewise got a credit card machine up and running recently.
"It's been a few weeks that they've been able to do that," Sequoia spokeswoman Kris Fister said Tuesday.
The Internet and toll-free telephone numbers, which also provide potential fee-payment schemes, are used by only a handful of parks, fish and wildlife refuges and national forests.
The GAO survey of 346 such federal sites is the largest of its kind since Congress authorized the higher entrance fees in 1996.
Yosemite already has a $20 entrance fee. Under the demonstra-tion program approved by Con-gress, parks including Sequoia and Kings Canyon could raise entrance fees to $20.
Instead of sending all the money back to Washington, as used to happen, the parks and forests can keep up to 80% for their own purposes.
Parks pocket millions
Yosemite alone earned more than $12 million through the entrance fees in fiscal 2001.
Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks together earned total of $2.1 million through the entrance fee program in fiscal 2000.
The Sequoia money paid for projects such as restoring the Highway 198 entrance station - the one where credit cards are now accepted.
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