Governor Ditches State Parks Privatization Plan With Lawmakers In A Lather Over Outsourcing

NASHVILLE, TN — The Haslam Administration rather discreetly dropped its high-profile — and widely criticized — plans to outsource the operation of the state's parks to private contractors, as lawmakers are in a lather about the effects of outsourcing at the Capitol.

Tennessee Environment and Conservation Commissioner Bob Martineau told a study committee Thursday that the administration had decided to focus on addressing capital needs at state parks instead of continuing a privatization pursuit.

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At a Chattanooga Rotary Club meeting Thursday, Gov. Bill Haslam confirmed the shift, saying that with his term ending in January 2019, before any work could be completed, he felt it best to leave decisions on the long-term future of the parks to his successor.

"It didn't feel right for us to say that we were going to hire an operator for the park or decide that we were going to operate the park ourselves when we are not going to be the ones to be in office at that time," he told the Times Free Press.

At the center of the issue was the popular, but aging, inn at Fall Creek Falls State Park in remote Van Buren and Bledsoe counties on the Cumberland Plateau, where the park provides reliable work for local residents. The administration planned to turn over the park's operation to a private company while tearing down and rebuilding the inn, but pushback from locals and legislators, plus a lack of bids, stalled that effort.

Meanwhile, lawmakers filed a bill that sought more oversight over the governor's broader outsourcing plan. That bill was sent to "summer study," which is sometimes a euphemistic legal fiction the legislature uses to quietly kill a bill without voting on it, but in this case was genuine.

And while the state parks are the high-profile example of outsourcing and the bigger picture issue is about job security and benefits for state employees broadly, a recent meeting of that study committee surrounded a discussion about the level of service legislators themselves are seeing at the Capitol, where janitorial services are already run privately.

What had lawmakers in a lather is a lack of soap — or at least that was the example closest at hand.

"If anyone cares to go into the second-floor men's restroom, right up there, you'll see that another legislator took it upon themselves to bring soap," State Rep. Tilman Goins, a Morristown Republican, said at a hearing last week, according to WPLN. "Now I'm kind of OCD. I'm the type of person that washes their hands and then grabs the napkin to open the door, and I found myself many times standing there, figuring out how to open the door because there were no napkins."

Sen. Richard Briggs, a Knoxville Republican, said he didn't think his office had been vacuumed in a year.

A cynic might say the politicians are only effected by an issue when it hits close to home — or the office, as the case may be — but the Capitol is one of the best examples of the long-term effects of outsourcing, as its janitorial services have been operated privately since 2013.

Image via United States Department of Agriculture