5 ms·

at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is more about the lack of governance with the free structure and not abiding by the law about establis

at what cost? and what is the governance model? The suit is more about the lack of governance with the free structure and not abiding by the law about establishing fees . Here's one example from the article Last year there were 22,435 lottery applicants for a permit to run the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Only 330 individuals received a permit. Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. Under Booz Allen’s arrangement with the federal government, it could pocket all lottery fees, which amounted to $134,610 just for the Middle Fork lottery

taftster 3y ago
That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to the park for use and maintenance of the resource. I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.
Ductapemaster 3y ago
I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection specifically? I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.
- natpalmer1776 3y ago
  The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds of the lottery tickets. In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    The value being provided here is the website, which received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery proceeds.
    - natpalmer1776 3y ago
      Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz’s website I see that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to taxpayers.
      - singleshot_ 3y ago
        Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a government contractor. Instead of buying us a website, they sold us.
      - StillBored 3y ago
        But an endless cost on the backend... Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.
      - asdff 3y ago
        The state and federal governments trains hundreds of thousands of computer science engineers a year. Engineering students are also in dire need of internships to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a website at little cost to taxpayers would be an internship program using a portion of the massive engineering workforce government is already paying to train, although that would mean a consultants hands are removed from the honeyjar. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
    - StillBored 3y ago
      The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors. How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc. Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor. $6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.
- post-it 3y ago
  The objection is that this is a government monopoly funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    What has BAH's total profits been on this project? What did they spend to make it, what have their operating costs amounted to, how much have they made?
- csharpminor 3y ago
  As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view estimated odds I have not seen it. Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.
  - pc86 3y ago
    If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend entirely on how many people sign up?
    - anthlax 3y ago
      Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is worse than entering the Wednesday one
      - csharpminor 3y ago
        Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great margin. The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination. If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.
    - csharpminor 3y ago
      Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have no clue what you're getting when you give them your $6-$15.
- tonymet 3y ago
  It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case). It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events. It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition. These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property
- gcanyon 3y ago
  I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than that. It just seems egregiously expensive.
  - solardev 3y ago
    If you have the means, how about starting a better-run company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such an effort.
    - gcanyon 3y ago
      I’ll see what I can figure out. Feel free to email me (address in my profile).
    - havnagiggle 3y ago
      Honestly a wave of non-profit software companies would be a fantastic boon for the world. However my current work arrangement is tough to top so for fairly selfish reasons I probably wouldn't consider it for a few more years.
solardev 3y ago
For clarity, I'm totally for this suit, and hope that the public can claw back those dollars. But in the grand scheme of things, that seems like such a minor technicality. $6 to $15 here or there, a couple times a year on vacation, is way better than the alternative systems that were common before recreation.gov, with faxed lotteries, long delays, and high uncertainty. It used to be common that you'd just have to drive to the place, wait an hour or two in line, pay the admission fee (if you don't have a annual pass), then sign up for some lottery on the spot at like 7am and wait a few hours to hear back. If you don't get it, well, there goes your plans... but you're already there. By contrast, a small fee here and there for the ahead-of-time guarantee of a reservation is totally worth it. $130,000 to run a lottery system effectively? That's not a whole lot. Even if it costs a few million, nationally, to run them... that's nothing. I can pretty much guarantee you the NPS, USFS, and BLM together wouldn't be able to run a smooth national reservation & lottery system with the same budget and fees. The agencies themselves are so far removed -- in both mission and skill set -- from modern app UX that they probably wouldn't be able to get the job done even with 10x the budget. I don't doubt that the contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) is a scumbag for pocketing those fees, which are unnecessary to begin with (it's not like it costs $15 in CPU or human processing time to do a change). It'd be great if the public gets those back. All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the increased costs to the public, because it actually works, vs the chaos that came before it. That website makes public lands FAR more discoverable, accessible, and reliable -- at the cost of minor corruption. I think that is an ultimately acceptable tradeoff, even if it's not ideal. (And it's not like I'm some libertarian; I love our parks and public lands, but digital anything just really isn't their strong suit. I'm grateful they outsourced it.) Maybe what we need, in lieu of effective federal digital agencies, is some sort of public-FOSS partnership that can take the place of public-private partnerships. But that's much harder for the agencies to deal with than a central commercial entity with designated contacts, support, etc. And the FOSS model isn't really set up to communicate in the real world with the super complicated division of public lands across federal/state/local/agency divides, each with their own little fiefdoms and idiosyncrasies and rules and regulations. I wonder how other countries manage similar use cases (digital presence for public lands)? Recently went hiking in Taiwan and reserved a trail permit; the UX was terrible even by 90s standards -- at least it was online -- but at least it worked. Not sure how they funded it, but I don't remember there being any fees.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. You actually need the lottery fees not to be refunded, otherwise people will spam the system, knowing they will get their lottery fee returned to them if they are not successful.

taftster 3y ago

That's interesting and extremely agitating. I had always thought the majority of the lottery fees were going back to the park for use and maintenance of the resource. I get it, there is an underlying profit motive that needs to be satisfied by the hosting company (Booz). And recreation.gov is sure tons better than anything that came before (especially for rafting trip lotteries). But yeah, there's a lot of money there that really should mostly being going back to the management entity.

Ductapemaster 3y ago

I would like to understand why this is a problem? Objectively, they ran the lottery, distributed the permits, and charged a fee to do so. What is your objection specifically? I don't intend to passively inject an opinion — just trying to understand your position.

natpalmer1776 3y ago
The item of value being offered by the lottery is taxpayer funded, whereas most lotteries fund prizes via the proceeds of the lottery tickets. In this way, it can be considered exploitative since the proceeds don’t go back into “the pot” to any degree.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The value being provided here is the website, which received no taxpayer funding other than the lottery proceeds.
  - natpalmer1776 3y ago
    Ah, I stand corrected, looking at Booz’s website I see that the agreement from the start was no upfront cost to taxpayers.
    - singleshot_ 3y ago
      Therein lies the rub: the people we selected to represent us turned us into a cash flow which they then sold to a government contractor. Instead of buying us a website, they sold us.
    - StillBored 3y ago
      But an endless cost on the backend... Sounds like a great deal. At least for one political party who's entire theory of government is starving the beast. Labeling a fee based rental agreement as not being a tax is more important than what the actual final use cost actually is. Even if the users actually paying the fee end up spending orders of magnitude more in the long run. Its a fantastic way to hide immense sums of corruption, it just needs to be done one dollar at a time.
    - asdff 3y ago
      The state and federal governments trains hundreds of thousands of computer science engineers a year. Engineering students are also in dire need of internships to appear employable. Seems like another way to run a website at little cost to taxpayers would be an internship program using a portion of the massive engineering workforce government is already paying to train, although that would mean a consultants hands are removed from the honeyjar. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if booze allens own college summer interns are doing the bulk of the work on this website.
  - StillBored 3y ago
    The _POINT_ of computers and websites is to lower the individual transactional costs of things like applying for a lottery. Rather than having to pick up the phone and speak to a person, or drive to the local office and fill out paperwork. Yet somehow, the person in the toll booth option has regularly been the cheaper option than paying these immense fee's to obviously corrupt government contractors. How many web site designers and colocated machines does it take to run a freaking reservation system that probably gets a couple million reservations a day. Plus, if done correctly a large initial investment and then a trivial amount of work to keep it running, where the vast majority of the work is the local parks/etc changing the state of campground availability/etc. Put another way, everyone wants to be the credit card companies that have successfully gotten massively rich on a system where they are taking a percentage of the total transactional value rather than a trivial flat per transaction fee. And this model doesn't belong anywhere near public systems because those public lands exist for the "public", the majority of which can barely afford the gas to get to the park, much less funneling more of their meager resources to a fat cat government contractor. $6 is close to an hours work for someone making minimum wage.
post-it 3y ago
The objection is that this is a government monopoly funnelling money to a private company beyond what GP (and myself) consider to be a reasonable profit margin.
- vel0city 3y ago
  What has BAH's total profits been on this project? What did they spend to make it, what have their operating costs amounted to, how much have they made?
csharpminor 3y ago
As someone who participates in these lotteries, the lack of transparency is the biggest issue. If there's a way to view estimated odds I have not seen it. Additionally, these lotteries usually have a second level of rules that impact your odds. For example, day of week or starting trailhead. I would gladly shift dates / routes and apply for different lotteries, but I have little basis to make those decisions on.
- pc86 3y ago
  If there are only 330 permits don't the odds depend entirely on how many people sign up?
  - anthlax 3y ago
    Perhaps the above comment means that the secondary factors affect the denominator - i.e more people go hiking on Saturday, so entering the Saturday lottery is worse than entering the Wednesday one
    - csharpminor 3y ago
      Exactly, and it impacts the denominator by a great margin. The value of the lottery ticket to me is a function of the cost, odds, timing and interest I have in the destination. If the odds of one trailhead are 1000x lower than another one that is comparable across the other variables then I'm needlessly overpaying, and Booze Allen pockets that inefficiency.
  - csharpminor 3y ago
    Sure, but they could display odds from past lotteries or provide current odds at time of purchase. You really have no clue what you're getting when you give them your $6-$15.
tonymet 3y ago
It doesn't abide by the law (the plaintiffs case). It's not free enterprise: the govt is granting them a monopoly on ticket sales for those events. It's economically inefficient. The operators are making insane profit margins (likely 75%+ ) with no competition. These are public resources funded by tax payers. The operator is making illegal and unreasonable profit on the taxpayers property
gcanyon 3y ago
I would happily code and run a lottery system for $0.99 per entry. Someone else would likely do it for cheaper than that. It just seems egregiously expensive.
- solardev 3y ago
  If you have the means, how about starting a better-run company or cooperative or nonprofit to compete against the likes of Booz? I'd love to join and/or support such an effort.
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    I’ll see what I can figure out. Feel free to email me (address in my profile).
  - havnagiggle 3y ago
    Honestly a wave of non-profit software companies would be a fantastic boon for the world. However my current work arrangement is tough to top so for fairly selfish reasons I probably wouldn't consider it for a few more years.

solardev 3y ago

For clarity, I'm totally for this suit, and hope that the public can claw back those dollars. But in the grand scheme of things, that seems like such a minor technicality. $6 to $15 here or there, a couple times a year on vacation, is way better than the alternative systems that were common before recreation.gov, with faxed lotteries, long delays, and high uncertainty. It used to be common that you'd just have to drive to the place, wait an hour or two in line, pay the admission fee (if you don't have a annual pass), then sign up for some lottery on the spot at like 7am and wait a few hours to hear back. If you don't get it, well, there goes your plans... but you're already there. By contrast, a small fee here and there for the ahead-of-time guarantee of a reservation is totally worth it. $130,000 to run a lottery system effectively? That's not a whole lot. Even if it costs a few million, nationally, to run them... that's nothing. I can pretty much guarantee you the NPS, USFS, and BLM together wouldn't be able to run a smooth national reservation & lottery system with the same budget and fees. The agencies themselves are so far removed -- in both mission and skill set -- from modern app UX that they probably wouldn't be able to get the job done even with 10x the budget. I don't doubt that the contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton) is a scumbag for pocketing those fees, which are unnecessary to begin with (it's not like it costs $15 in CPU or human processing time to do a change). It'd be great if the public gets those back. All I'm saying is that recreation.gov is totally and absolutely worth it despite these fees, despite the increased costs to the public, because it actually works, vs the chaos that came before it. That website makes public lands FAR more discoverable, accessible, and reliable -- at the cost of minor corruption. I think that is an ultimately acceptable tradeoff, even if it's not ideal. (And it's not like I'm some libertarian; I love our parks and public lands, but digital anything just really isn't their strong suit. I'm grateful they outsourced it.) Maybe what we need, in lieu of effective federal digital agencies, is some sort of public-FOSS partnership that can take the place of public-private partnerships. But that's much harder for the agencies to deal with than a central commercial entity with designated contacts, support, etc. And the FOSS model isn't really set up to communicate in the real world with the super complicated division of public lands across federal/state/local/agency divides, each with their own little fiefdoms and idiosyncrasies and rules and regulations. I wonder how other countries manage similar use cases (digital presence for public lands)? Recently went hiking in Taiwan and reserved a trail permit; the UX was terrible even by 90s standards -- at least it was online -- but at least it worked. Not sure how they funded it, but I don't remember there being any fees.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> Yet, all applicants paid the $6 lottery fee -- even unsuccessful lottery applicants. You actually need the lottery fees not to be refunded, otherwise people will spam the system, knowing they will get their lottery fee returned to them if they are not successful.