West Virginia ran a 45-park system for years without charging a soul to drive in. Only nine states in the country operated that way. The bill came due anyway, in the form of lodges pushing 50 years old and a maintenance list nobody had budgeted for.
Stephen McDaniel of St. Augustine, Florida inherited that list in February 2017, when Governor Jim Justice appointed him Director of the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. The parks were drawing about seven million visits a year. They were also drawing roughly $17 million a year in state subsidy just to keep the doors open.
Free Was Never Free
Somebody pays for a park. If it is not the visitor, it is the taxpayer, and if it is neither, it is the building itself, quietly, over 20 years, until the roof fails.
McDaniel put the problem plainly at the time. “Many of our lodge parks in our system are approaching 50 years of age,” he said. “We have a lot of deferred maintenance.”
That is not a complaint about money. It is a math problem with a due date.
Somebody Has to Say the Number Out Loud
Park fees are politically ugly in a way that park funding is not. Everyone wants the lodge repaired. Almost nobody wants to be the person who announced a charge at the gate.
McDaniel had spent 1987 to 2009 running businesses where the price of a thing had to cover the cost of the thing. That is a different reflex than the one you develop in government.
Two Dollars Is Not a Tax
The fix started small. A $2 per vehicle day-use fee, a $12 annual pass, piloted at seven parks: Babcock, Blackwater Falls, Cacapon Resort, Coopers Rock, Little Beaver, Pipestem Resort, and Valley Falls.
Projected first-year collection was $1.1 to $1.2 million. Against a $17 million subsidy, that sounds like rounding error. It was not meant to close the gap on its own.
It was meant to establish a principle that 41 other states had already settled. People who use a park can contribute to keeping it standing.
The Buildings Do Not Care About Your Budget Cycle
Here is the part that gets lost in arguments about park fees. Deferred maintenance is not deferred. It compounds.
A roof you patch this year for a few thousand dollars becomes a roof you replace in five for many times that. An HVAC system from the Clinton administration runs, sort of, and eats the difference in utilities every month it stays in service. The savings are imaginary and the cost is real.
Stephen McDaniel came to the agency from business, having spent 1987 to 2012 building and running a medical supply and home infusion company with his father. Capital planning was not a new concept. Neither was the idea that putting something off has a price.
People Were Leaving Too Early
There was a second number bothering him. Visitors to West Virginia parks were staying about two days. The national average was closer to four and a half.
“We have to give people more of a reason to stay in our parks,” McDaniel said. A day of difference across seven million visits is not a rounding error, it is the whole lodging economy of several counties.
His answer was unfashionably practical. Build two to three mile loop trails in six parks, so a family has something to do on the morning of day three.
What the Investment Actually Bought
Over his tenure the agency directed more than $151 million into state park and forest improvements. State park revenue set a record in 2021, up 22 percent against 2016.
Alongside that, the state built the West Virginia State Parks Endowment, funded by oil and gas royalties from state land. That is the piece with the longest shelf life. A fee raises money this year. An endowment raises money in a year when nobody is paying attention.
Stephen McDaniel left the post in January 2022 and now grows Christmas trees in Tucker County. The lodges are still standing. Some of them have new roofs.
You can argue about whether $2 a car was the right number. What you cannot argue is that a park system with seven million visitors and a 50-year-old building stock was going to fix itself.