To the Editor:

My name is Richard Green. I’m not sure if your newspaper publishes any special interest stories, or has an investigative reporter on staff, so I am submitting my story, which started out as a complain to Park Services, which is a division of the Casitas Water District. I am happy to speak with anyone who feels that this story should be looked into deeper and ultimately published.
Park Services, who handles RV Camping Reservations, which falls under the watchful eye of The Casitas Water District, is suspected of not following their own protocol of opening up camping reservation dates to the general public. Specifically, when reservations opened up for the weekend of the Ojai Wine Festival, June 17th, all of the full hook-up sites (36 sites) were gone at 12:00 AM on March 18th (which is the precise time they were open for public reservations). I questioned the Park Services Manager about their processing of reservations through their website. It appears that these sites were either assigned politically, or to friends and family, prior to being made available to the public. This sounds like a page out of the Ticketmaster debacle. The Park Manager, Joe Martinez, after speaking with his system providers, responded that the reservation system was accepting mobile bookings faster than computers and had no reason as to why this occurred. I waited months for the moment tickets were supposed to be made available to the public and accessed their site with a MacBook operating at 500 Mbps, and instantly all 36 sites showed up as unavailable. My friend who was trying to access the system from his mobile phone at the same time, experiences the same result. There is something unethical about the way reservations are being assigned, before availability to the public. I asked Mr. Martinez to check the time stamps of the existing reservations, and to date, he has not gotten back to me. There is apparent impropriety going on here which needs to be looked into further. I am available to share my actual email complaint and the Park Services response to anyone who feels it may be useful. Thank you for reading my story.
Richard Green