WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has appointed 16 representatives of the outdoor recreation industry to advise him on how to operate public lands, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post, including three people whom department officials flagged as potentially having a conflict of interest on the matter.
The membership of the “Made in America” Outdoor Recreation Advisory Committee, which Zinke launched in November, marks the third time the secretary has assembled panels dominated by industry players to help chart policies affecting their businesses. The majority of members of the Royalty Policy Committee hail from the oil, gas and mining industries; the new International Wildlife Conservation Council is largely composed of people with ties to trophy hunting.
Records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that industry representatives urged Zinke to establish the new recreation panel to provide their clients a greater voice in shaping Interior’s policies. While the appointments have not been made public yet, The Post independently obtained the final list. The selections include officials representing companies with National Park Service contracts, such as those in the hospitality sector, as well as those from the manufacturing, fishing, boating and all-terrain vehicle industries.
Several outdoor industry representatives interviewed in recent weeks said they had spent years working to convince federal officials that they deserved greater input in policymaking, given their businesses’ impact on the U.S. economy. In February, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis concluded that outdoor recreation and supporting activities, such as construction and travel, accounts for 2 percent, or $373.7 billion, of the nation’s gross domestic product.
Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association, said he began pushing to create a broad umbrella group during President Barack Obama’s second term so industry officials could present “a unified recreation voice to whoever won the election.”
Zinke has met multiple times with representatives of the new trade association, the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable.
Hugelmeyer, who is the roundtable’s vice chair, said that when it comes to public lands, “The administration and the secretary have been fairly responsive to industry on ideas that will improve access, infrastructure and growth.”
Asked for comment on the panel, Interior officials said that they were looking into the matter.
Internal emails among Interior staffers attribute the genesis of the Made in America committee to Derrick Crandall, who has been selected to serve on the panel. In addition to being the roundtable trade association’s president, Crandall is chief executive of the American Recreation Coalition, which includes boat and snowmobile manufacturers and ATV dealers, and counselor for the National Park Hospitality Association.
The advisory committee “is coming out of Derrick’s conversations with the Secretary,” wrote Lena McDowall, the National Park Service’s deputy director for management and administration, to a colleague in a Nov. 7 email.
In an interview Monday, Crandall said he was “excited” to serve on the panel, adding that Interior had concluded his ties to concessionaires did not represent a conflict.
“I get no money directly from any contract with Interior,” he said, adding that when it came to advocates such as himself, “We can represent expertise and experience, and add something to the deliberations of a body.”
In an interview earlier this month, Crandall said Zinke came up with the idea of an outdoor recreation committee during a meeting in his office with industry officials in April. The secretary noted that while the department had roughly 200 federally chartered advisory panels, Crandall recalled, “he expressed that none of them were equipped to tell him what he really wanted to know” about improving access to public lands.
Last year, Zinke suspended all of the department’s advisory committees as his staff conducted a review of their operations. Most of them have resumed operations, but some of them have yet to convene a meeting since the start of the Trump administration. In January, nearly all of the members of the National Park System Advisory Board quit in protest, saying that Zinke had reversed several key Park Service policies without soliciting their input.
During the recent selection process for the Made in America panel, Interior staffers color-coded Crandall’s name along with those of Bruce Fears, president of Aramark Leisure, and Jeremy Jacobs Jr., co-chief executive of Delaware North, for having potential conflicts of interest. The document places Crandall in the category of “individuals who advocate for and represent the interests of NPS concessioners” and Fears and Jacobs as “current concessioners with the NPS.”
Both Aramark and Delaware North rank among the Park Service’s biggest concessionaires: Aramark has a $2 billion contract to operate concessions at Yosemite National Park, while Delaware North runs concessions at Shenandoah, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
Both Fears and Jacobs Jr. won appointments on the panel, according to the final list, while the one other nominee flagged for having a potential conflict of interest, AccessParks chief executive Tim Rout, did not.
None of the four nominees put forth by the Outdoor Industry Association — which represents 1,200 manufacturers, retailers, distributors, suppliers, sales representatives and nonprofits — made it on the new committee. The group, which generally advocates on behalf of those who engage in nonmotorized activities such as mountain climbing, hiking and kayaking, had criticized Trump’s decision to scale back Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments’ boundaries in December.
Kate Kelly, director for public lands at the liberal Center for American Progress, questioned why Interior would establish an advisory panel comprising entirely members who had a financial interest in the department’s policy decisions.
“This is less of an advisory committee on outdoor recreation and more of an echo chamber for how public lands can be tools for private profit,” she said. “The group seems to have been handpicked to cheerlead for more motorized use of public lands, more roads through the backcountry and more taxpayer subsidies for hotels chains operating in the national parks.”
