VA State Parks dog fee
I received an email last night from Nancy Heltman with the VA state park system and part of the note said, "I know that many of our campers will be happy to hear that effective Jan. 1 we will no longe...
Forum Discussion
Lantley wrote:wbwood wrote:amandasgramma wrote:
!!!!???? So the dog owners no longer have an extra fee, now EVERYONE has to pay extra.........yeah, as a non-dog owner, I'm not sure that's fair!!!!!! We'll add them to OUR "No-Go" list.....
It wasn't about dogs in the first place. My opinion after contacting VASP for an article, the response I received (which you can read via a link in the article), is that it was always about money. In the letter they sent me, Joe Elton, State Parks Director, mentioned all the complaints they received. He even stated that they once thought of not allowing pets at all. But instead, they came up with the fee. So in other words, they thumbed their noses to the complainers and the dog owners. They looked at it as a way to raise revenues. Which to me, sounds fair. We can not expect them to work on the same budget year after year. Things cost more. Staff salaries cost more. Eventually you got to raise the price overall.
I can agree that you eventually have to raise prices overall, but you don't have to eliminate fees already in place. It's easy to eliminate dog fees if you raise the base rate.
It even proves even more that it was a revenue thing. $3 more per site all the time/every day will give them more revenue than a $5 dog fee here and there and a max of 2 times a week. Especially when dog owners started to refuse going at all. I would imagine that hurt them more than it was supposedly going to help. You could even go as far to say it was a deterent for dog owners not to bring their dogs. But I would guess once again, it hurt them more so.
