I've been desperately trying to ignore this little news item, but haven't been successful.  It's not that I don't agree that the North Entrance to Yellowstone National Park needs to be reconstructed and improved; it does.  Nor do I disagree with Yellowstone Forever (YF) using a fraction of the money it collects to support this project; I don't and it should.  No, this little bit of unpaid advertising for YF sticks in my craw for other reasons.

First, although I'm not bothered by YF supporting this project, I believe you need to look at the complete picture and I am bothered by how YF has allocated funds in other areas.  After protracted negotiations, YF was officially born in the fall of 2016, about the time the Trump Administration was preparing to come into power.  It was formed through a not entirely friendly, some have implied coerced, merger of the Yellowstone Association, which ran Yellowstone National Park's nonprofit visitor center bookstores for many decades, with a more recently formed outside fundraising group, the Yellowstone Park Foundation.

In one of their earliest major actions, YF's Board of Directors recruited the nonprofit's first CEO with an annual compensation package totaling over $286,000 for supervising a relatively small nonprofit with fewer than a hundred and fifty employees, most of them low wage seasonal workers.  This figure did not include the high annual expenses that the previous CEO ran up traveling extensively to "represent Yellowstone" around the country and probably elsewhere as well.  According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle (BDC), which has mysteriously stopped covering YF's antics, this figure also did not include the rest of the compensation for the six top "officers, directors, trustees, key employees, and highest compensated employees" of YF, which, for most of the first three years of YF's existence, totaled more than $1 million annually, again not counting expenses.  During that period, all other labor costs, for all other YF employees, ran less than $5.5 million annually.  Again according to the BDC, YF ran a relatively continuous ~$2 million annual deficit on ~$16 million in annual revenue during that period and, at the beginning of this past summer, carried cumulative debt of over $4 million.

All of this was revealed when YF's previous CEO suddenly resigned at the beginning of Yellowstone's 2019 summer season and John Walda, YF's Board Treasurer, took over as interim CEO.  Quoting the BDC, Walda "declined to comment" on whether the previous CEO would receive any more funds from YF after abruptly leaving the nonprofit.  But, Walda was there, on YF's Board in his role as Board Treasurer, when these seemingly excessive compensation packages were all arranged, high expenses were approved, and YF was set on a path into debt.  And, he is interim CEO of an "official nonprofit partner" of a federal agency that, based on that federal government connection, is allowed to operate in federally owned facilities, on federal property, in a national park, with access to millions of dollars in well-intended public donations as a result.  Did Walda and does Walda still really not know whether the previous CEO will get any more of those public donations or did he and does he simply not believe the public has a right to know how their donations are being spent?

So, what would motivate a man with Walda's alleged business and management experience to allow, if not downright enable, what appears to be excessive feeding on a nonprofit?  According to the BDC, Walda claims a headhunting firm's "comparability study" justified it all.  Well, given that headhunting firms advertise and recruit by showcasing the high compensation offers received by the people they place, while also basing their fees on a percentage of those high offers, does anyone think a headhunting firm ever inflated a justification for compensation, especially in a case involving an organization that perhaps actually wanted to give sweetheart deals to a few politically or otherwise connected cronies?  It appears those six top dogs may have gotten sweetheart deals and perhaps looking at the composition and backgrounds of YF's Board of Directors might explain why.

You might expect that, in a nonprofit supporting a place like Yellowstone, the Board of Directors might be overloaded with wild and wooly environmentalists, conservation biologists, botanists, geologists, and naturalists, maybe with a few management types hanging on just to keep them on track; but, that really isn't the case for YF's Board and it certainly wasn't the case a year or two ago.  If YF's Board during that period was skewed in any particular direction, it seemed to be toward folks with oil and gas backgrounds, toward corporate marketing and spin specialists, and toward people associated with ideologies that brought Trump and his administration to power and with the party that still defiantly defends him.  On YF's website, the information on YF's Board Chair touts religious activities and support for our military, but omits Kay Prothro Yeager's stake in the Perkins-Prothro Company and its oil and gas exploration and development interests or her past gun rights positions or support for the National Rifle Association.  I suspect the information on other Directors omits a bit here and there as well.  No, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Directors having diverse backgrounds and holding diverse opinions; however, transparency is usually a good thing, especially when you sit on the Board of an "official nonprofit partner" of a federal agency that, based on that federal government connection, is allowed to operate retail stores, at little to no rent, in federally owned facilities, on federal property, in national park visitors' centers, with access to millions of dollars in well-intended public donations as a result.

Isn't this all old news now that the previous CEO and other cronies have left the nonprofit?  Not really, because some of those highly paid cronies remain in place and I presume are still being paid and still using the housing and the new furnishings that YF provided as their Yellowstone summer vacation home.  And, I suspect their durability is at least partially due to the strength of their connections with the Trump Administration and the interests that back it.  In fact, new cronies actually appear to have been added.  YF's onsite parent group, the Yellowstone Association maintained a longtime Director of Board Relations who had extensive knowledge of the park.  YF's Board removed him in a somewhat draconian fashion, which would not be unusual, and replaced him with a relative of the director of a rightwing think tank and lobbying operation based out of Bozeman.  Yes, the most important question would be whether this new Director of Board Relations has the kind of deep knowledge of Yellowstone or of nonprofit operations that would be valuable to the Board and justify using nonprofit funds to put them in this position and the answer is not really.  Neither this individual nor the director of that think tank and lobbying operation based out of Bozeman had any discernible knowledge of or connection to the American West, to Montana or to Yellowstone prior to bagging their appointments.  They are actually veterans of the Jeb Bush regime in Florida.  Given the apparent "crust" that YF seems bold enough to display, I'm surprised they didn't just give the job to Katherine Harris herself, although perhaps she didn't like Montana's weather.  This isn't an issue for the think tank; they can do what they please; but, again, YF is an "official nonprofit partner" of a federal agency that, based on that federal government connection, is allowed to operate retail stores, at little to no rent, in federally owned facilities, on federal property, in national park visitor centers, with access to millions of dollars in well-intended public donations as a result.

Now this National Parks Traveler (NPT) news item also quotes Walda misleadingly speaking of this "$2 million donation" to the North Entrance Project.  Actually, YF seems to only have provided $1 million; "federal matching funds" that presumably came from the taxpayers at large made up the balance.  Again, YF in general and Walda in particular seem to need to work on clarity and credibility.

And, there are too many concerns with YF to address here; but, I do need to address one other concern.  There are so many nonprofits supporting national parks all across America, Grand Teton Association, Grand Teton National Park Foundation, Washington's National Park Fund, Friends of Acadia, Western National Park Association, and many others.  NPT itself is apparently actively supported by some of these groups.  Almost any of these groups will make $1 million in contributions to their home park, often almost every year.  There are so many generous philanthropic contributions being made to our national parks that NPT doesn't even bother to announce many of them.  Yet, NPT often seems willing to carry whatever YF wants to publicize.  If I was part of the leadership team of one of these other groups, I would be asking myself why and wondering if my nonprofit needed to curtail its own philanthropic contributions in order to maintain its own fancy and often expensive team of "communications and spin specialists" to ensure consistent and balanced coverage.  I think everyone who truly loves our national parks can see that having marketeers everywhere instead of conservationists or naturalists would ultimately be counterproductive for our parks.

At the very least, I'm sorry but I just truly believe that coverage of national park nonprofits should be consistent and balanced and that any fluff piece advertising this onetime $1 million contribution to a single park project ought to be accompanied with some context on YF's ~$16 million in annual revenue, the nearly $3 million that YF spent and may still be spending on these rich compensation packages, the debt that has been incurred by YF because of their lavish spending on things other than the park itself, and the nonprofit's continuing defiant aversion to transparency and full disclosure.