Take a wild Standing Boy safari

Sounds like Standing Boy State Park will be rather luxurious — extravagant, even.

At a community meeting last week, a Department of Natural Resources consultant who’s to plan a park at Columbus’ Old River Road Standing Boy Wildlife Management Area proffered an epic menu of options:

Where now rests a dove field, the park could have a pavilion to be rented for weddings or other social events, with a kitchen suited to a chef.

It could be a venue for concerts, outdoor movies and races. It could have a rope course or other artifice that facilitates “adventure play” like corporate team-building.

The raw riverbank could be developed for a dock.

The park could have rental cabins, and, the consultant added, “You have to have a little RV parking.”

You also have to have housing for on-site management, and a staff, like a manager, assistant manager, maintenance supervisor and secretary.

Other adventure play the facilities may facilitate are trail biking and Frisbee golf, and possibly horseback riding, once I asked about it. (I ride there.)

Oh! And don’t forget nature programs for kids — so that after passing the trailer park and parking lots and pavilion and cabins, children can take a nature tour.

What a wild animal safari that will be, huh? Imagine the tour guide seeing a live critter and screaming “Squirrel!” as the kids’ heads snap around like that dog in the movie “Up.”

That may go for hunting, too, once Standing Boy’s a park. Imagine stalking what game remains when someone yells “Squirrel!” and it’s blown to gray belly lint.

Embedded in this proposal is the circular logic that you can’t have a state park unless you build in enough revenue to run it like a business: It must be self-sustaining, after taxpayers pay for the design, engineering, architecture, clearing, grading, sewer, water and electricity.

After all that, Wild Standing Boy Safari has to pay for itself, in user fees and rentals. The park’s revenue stream must be piped in like the water it runs through culverts to pave roads, parking lots and trailer parks.

Why build and staff all that if it costs so much to operate?

Because of a looping rationale that goes like this:

“We need the revenue to maintain it.”

But if you don’t build it, you don’t have to maintain it.

“But we have to build it.”

Why?

“Because we need the money.”

Why?

“So we can maintain it.”

But if you don’t build it, it does not exist.

“We have to build it.”

Why?

“Because we need the money.”

The kicker was the RV camping: The consultant dropped it in like an afterthought: The park may include the Executive Wedding Pavilion, The Cottages Off Green Island, Docks on The River, and … oh, by the way, you’ve got to have at least one Green Acres At The Restrooms mobile home park.

An RV park requires widened roads, turnarounds, parking pads, electrical hookups, a sewer dump and “comfort station.” And it needs overnight staffing, in case two retirees start fighting over backgammon and hurt themselves throwing lawn chairs at each other.

Someone besides a medic from Fire Station 14 up the street has to be there to write a report, in case one of the combatants sues, or one manages to hit a lick and goes to jail (then add law enforcement).

On the plus side, the consultant said that with this public investment in Standing Boy State Park will come nearby private development: restaurants, hotels, etc.

So it’s not like neighbors will just be living next to a trailer park.

This story was originally published June 12, 2016 at 12:56 PM with the headline "Take a wild Standing Boy safari."