August 9, 2016 Director Jonathan B. Jarvis National Park Service, Department of the Interior Superintendent David Vela, Grand Teton National Park National Park Service, Department of the Interior Deputy Inspector General Mary L. Kendall Department of the Interior Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice

Director Jarvis, Superintendent Vela, Deputy Inspector Kendall, and Assistant Attorney General Gupta: I am writing to file a formal complaint regarding improper and potentially illegal behavior by the Grand Teton Lodge Company (the “Company”), which is under contract with the National Park Service to operate the publicly-owned Jackson Lake Lodge. The Company’s actions, detailed below, at a minimum constitute egregious treatment of 39 of its customers. And they have compromised our federally-protected rights to free speech, assembly, and equal access to public accommodations. I therefore ask that you conduct a full investigation into the Company’s actions and identify appropriate sanctions that will protect the rights of future visitors to Grand Teton National Park. Every year in late August, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City hosts an Economic Policy Symposium at the Jackson Lake Lodge, a large resort with 385 sleeping rooms. The Symposium is a major public event that usually features highly-anticipated speeches by powerful government officials including the Chair and Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. However, the Symposium is invitation-only, closed to the public, requiring a $1000 ticket. I am the campaign director of Fed Up, a coalition of over two dozen community-based organizations, labor unions, and public policy advocacy organizations that promotes the creation of a strong economy with good jobs and rising wages for all. Our work has received widespread public attention and support, including from over 120 Members of Congress and Democratic Nominee for President Hillary Clinton. Over the past two years, the Fed Up coalition has sent a contingent of low-wage workers, community leaders, economists, and policy advocates to be present at the Lodge during the Symposium, in order to highlight the problematic ways in which Federal Reserve decision-making too often ignores the voices of Black and Latinx Americans and too often results in policies that privilege the interests of the wealthy over

the interests of working families. In both 2014 and 2015, our appearance at the Lodge for the Symposium generated dozens of articles in the national and international press, with headlines such as Unemployed take their case to Fed officials at Jackson Hole (Reuters, Aug. 23, 2014) and Activists jolt the Fed's mountain getaway (Politico, Aug. 28, 2015). In 2015, we brought 100 community and policy leaders from all around the country to an alternative conference, held in the ground floor conference rooms of the Lodge, which featured, among others, Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Jason Furman, the Chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. Like other guests, we paid for our sleeping rooms, conference space, and food and conference services. This year, we are once again planning to join the Federal Reserve at the Jackson Lake Lodge. (Because we were not allowed to rent out the ground floor rooms this year, we will be holding a public teach-in and a permitted demonstration directly outside of the Lodge; we will also conduct programming at a nearby hotel). In early May, members of our coalition made three separate reservations for a total of 13 rooms at the Lodge for the nights of August 24, 25, and 26. We paid for the rooms. We requested and paid for rollaway beds that would allow us to sleep three guests to a room, for a total of 39 guest accommodations. On July 26, my colleague Ruben Lucio received a phone call and then a follow-up email from Zachary Meyers, the Director of Hotel Operations at the Company, informing us that the Company would not honor our paid-for reservations and we could no longer stay at the Lodge. Meyers informed Lucio of a “reservations system glitch that caused the overbooking of Jackson Lake Lodge affecting your reservations” and explained that “the system issue caused us to take reservations for rooms that we don’t actually have inventory to honor. I’m very sorry for the unfortunate mishap with our systems at GTLC that led to this regrettable situation.” I then held two follow-up conversations with Alex Klein, the Company’s Vice President and General Manager. Klein informed me that the alleged computer glitch had impacted only the three nights for which we had reserved rooms. Of the 18 room reservations that Klein would not be honoring, 13 belonged to our coalition. Klein told me that although he was evicting us from the Lodge, he would be honoring the reservations of other guests who made their reservations after we did. (When we booked our rooms in May, we were told that there were approximately 100 rooms still available, which means that the Company is permitting many other guests to stay at the Lodge who booked their rooms well after we did). Klein explained that he made a “business decision” to cancel our reservations, rather than the last-in-time reservations of other guests, because our reservations were for blocks of 5, 5, and 3 rooms respectively. It was easier for his staff, he explained, to cancel our reservations than it would be for them to cancel 13 other reservations booked after ours that were not made in three chunks. “It’s easier for us,” strikes me as a particularly shameless explanation. (Klein offered us alternative accommodations at the Jenny Lake Lodge, 13 miles away from the Jackson Lake Lodge and 25 miles away from where the rest of our group will be staying, an arrangement that would create impossible logistical obstacles for us). Klein told me that the Company did not select our reservations for cancelation because of our membership in the Fed Up coalition and in fact did not know that they were reservations affiliated with the coalition. That contention defies belief. Our presence at the Lodge in 2014 and 2015 was widely covered in the press; I spent numerous hours on the phone with Klein and his staff in 2015 planning our event there. Our reservations this year were made by staff of three of our coalition’s organizations (the Center for Popular Democracy, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research) using our official work email addresses. All three organizations are listed on our coalition’s website and were present at last year’s alternative conference. Indeed, Myers read the names of the reservations that were being cancelled to Lucio over the phone and asked Lucio to identify anyone affiliated with Fed Up. When Lucio mistakenly did not identify the reservation of Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute as being with our group, Myers pressed Lucio: “Are you sure that Larry Mishel is not with your group?” This was the only

name on the list that Myers followed up on because Myers knew precisely who we were, despite Klein’s claims to the contrary. There is no legitimate explanation for the Company’s decision. As Klein explained to me, the Company books out its conference and sleeping rooms on a first-come first-serve basis. However, faced with an alleged computer glitch that affected only the three nights we were present, the Company decided to honor reservations made after ours and cancel our reservations. Our reservations constituted only 3 percent of the rooms at Jackson Lake Lodge (13 out of 385), yet the Company decided that our group would bear 72 percent of the total burden for its mistake (13 rooms out of 18 overbooked reservations). This is egregious disparate treatment. In addition, Klein’s stated rationale for selecting our 13 rooms for cancellation is an explicit and intentional targeting of our First Amendment right to assemble on government property: he selected us precisely because were a group of multiple guests. Because we were arriving in groups of 5, 5, and 3 rooms, we would not be allowed at the Lodge. (Yet Klein notably did not remove rooms from the reservation block belonging to the Kansas City Federal Reserve, even though its block was far larger than ours and would have been even “easier” to cancel.) It is also worth highlighting the racially disparate impact of the Company’s decision. The vast majority of guests at the Jackson Lake Lodge (and at the Federal Reserve’s symposium) are White. The vast majority of the attendees at our events in 2014 and 2015 were Black and Latinx; the same will be true in 2016 and would have been true of the 39 guests who were slated to stay in our rooms at the Lodge. Klein’s argument – “it was easier for us” – does not strike me as a legitimate or nondiscriminatory motive for his decision. Most of the invited guests at the Federal Reserve’s Symposium make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year; most of the members of our coalition are working class people struggling to survive in an economy that is rigged against them. I recognize that our presence is not desired by either the Company or the organizers of the Symposium; but the physical and virtual segregation of Federal Reserve decision-makers far away from the voices and opinions of working class people of color is precisely what the Fed Up coalition is trying to dismantle. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has been a major paying guest at the Lodge for over three decades. The Fed Up coalition has, over the past two years, raised significant concerns about the public policies of the Federal Reserve. We have been particularly critical of Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George, who has in recent years been the most outspoken advocate inside the Fed for raising interest rates and intentionally slowing down the economy. Our eviction from the Lodge will make it significantly more difficult for us to engage in Constitutionallyprotected speech and assembly: we have had to find alternative accommodations far away from the government decision-makers who are meeting at the Lodge and far away from the press that covers the Federal Reserve’s symposium. It is very hard for me to interpret the Company’s actions as anything other than a specific targeting of the Fed Up coalition. The Lodge is federal property, owned by the American people. The Company operates it under contract with the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. We believe that Company’s behavior raises serious concerns and therefore ask that you conduct an investigation into the following questions: 1. Did a computer glitch actually occur? When? How? What was the precise nature of the glitch? And how often has such a glitch occurred in the past?

2. What communications did staff of the Company have with one another about our planned arrival at the Lodge? How did they reach the decision to select our group for eviction? What communication, if any, did the Company have with the Kansas City Federal Reserve about our presence at the Lodge? 3. Was the Company’s decision to evict us appropriate and in accordance with its contractual obligations under its arrangement with the National Park Service? Did it violate any contractual duties of nondiscrimination, equal treatment, equal access, and respect for speech and assembly rights that the NPS imposes or expects of its contractors? 4. Was the Company’s decision to evict us lawful? Or did it violate the First Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other laws implicating equal access to and fair treatment in the National Parks? My colleagues and I are available at your convenience to discuss this matter and would gladly provide you with any necessary documentation (email correspondence, reservation receipts, etc.). I recognize that the Company may try to characterize this as a non-event – a simple reservation error that sometimes happens in the hospitality industry. I ask that you not take the Company at its word. Please evaluate for yourselves the evidence and judge for yourselves the reasonableness of its actions. I also recognize that you and your offices face heavy workloads and competing priorities. No lives have been lost in this affair; no public dollars stolen. And so it would be easy for you to ignore this letter. I hope that you will not. What happened here is that, once again, the voices and faces of working class people of color have been marginalized; they have been treated disrespectfully; their opportunity to enjoy our country’s National Parks has been subordinated to that of wealthy White guests; and an opaque, inaccessible, and incredibly powerful quasi-governmental institution has received a bit more insulation from the opinions of the people over whose lives it has so much power. I thank you for your attention to this matter. Sincerely,

Ady Barkan Campaign Director The Fed Up Coalition [email protected] (917) 605-4345 Cc: Rep. Rob Bishop and Rep. Raúl Grijalva, U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Sen. Maria Cantwell, U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Rep. Jeb Hensarling and Rep. Maxine Waters, U.S. House Committee on Financial Services Sen. Richard Shelby and Sen. Sherrod Brown, U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Frederica Wilson, and Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Congressional Full Employment Caucus Rep. G.K. Butterfield, Congressional Black Caucus Rep. Linda T. Sánchez, Congressional Hispanic Caucus