Scarcely anyone objected in
1996, when Congress authorized the Forest Service, Bureau of Land
Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service to charge the public new or increased fees for accessing
its own land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp or walk. After
all, it was going to be an experiment — a three-year pilot
program. Hence the name: “Fee Demonstration.”
But when it comes to federal revenue, intermittent streams have a
way of becoming perennial. Fee demo was extended in 2001, and again
in 2004, when it was expanded into the Recreation Enhancement Act.
RAT, for short, enabled the agencies to charge even more. The
system places federal land managers in the business of attracting
crowds, and it may motivate them to ignore the needs of fish and
wildlife. Recreation becomes a business.
The big
beneficiary of these access fees has been the motorized recreation
industry to which they’ve provided standing and
representation. Sponsoring Fee Demo through a cost-share
partnership with the Forest Service was the powerful American
Recreation Coalition, whose membership is comprised mainly of
manufacturers of all-terrain vehicles, motorized trail bikes, jet
skis and recreation vehicles. And joining the coalition in lobbying
aggressively for both Fee Demo and RAT have been the National Off
Highway Vehicle Coalition, the National Snowmobile Manufacturers
Association and consumers of all things motorized who band together
as the Blue Ribbon Coalition.
With little public or
congressional oversight the Forest Service assesses recreational
facilities for profitability. The ones that generate least revenue
— remote campgrounds and trailheads, places to which lovers of
wildness and quiet would naturally gravitate — are now first to
get disappeared. Bulldozers are knocking down campgrounds,
dismantling latrines, removing fire pits. You won’t even be
able to park. The agency is financing the process with $93 million
in fee receipts; in effect, charging you for the rope it hangs you
with.
As abusive as RAT fees are in their own right, the
Forest Service is abusing them further by playing fast and loose
with the law. The Recreation Enhancement Act requires that fees be
charged only if there has been “significant
investment,” defined as six amenities: security services,
meaning staffers who check to see if you’ve paid, parking,
toilets, picnic tables, trash receptacles, and signs.
A
site has to have all six. But the Forest Service has dreamed up a
way of getting around the law by designating sections of forest as
“High Impact Recreation Areas” (HIRAs). One corner of a
HIRA might have a sign; another, perhaps two miles away, a trash
can. Three miles from both might be a parking lot; the law makes no
reference to anything like an HIRA. The Forest Service flouts even
this bizarre interpretation of the law. Last year it admitted to
Congress that 739 HIRAs didn’t have the six amenities.
Moreover, there are at least 3,000 former Fee Demo sites outside
HIRAs that are still charging fees, many of them illegally.
When Christine Wallace, a Tucson legal secretary, refused
to pay a fee on a Coronado National Forest HIRA in Arizona, she was
prosecuted for what amounted to hiking without a license. While the
law allows the Forest Service to charge all manner of fees, it
specifically prohibits entrance fees. Accordingly, a court found
that the agency had acted illegally.
But the Forest
Service appealed, and in January 2007, won a reversal. If the
ruling is not struck down by Wallace’s motion to reconsider
or by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it seems headed,
case law will criminalize exiting your vehicle on your own public
land without first finding a ranger station, if one is open, and
coughing up money that even the motorized-recreation axis that
hatched RAT fees never intended for you to pay.
RAT fees
are more than just a ripoff. They’ve become a replacement for
squandered wealth, an incentive for continued profligacy, and an
excuse for the White House to keep slashing appropriations for
public-lands management.
Summing up the whole sorry mess
is district ranger Cid Morgan of the Angeles National Forest in
California: “We’re going to have to do more with less until
we do everything with nothing.”
If Morgan and other
forest advocates hope for relief from the Forest Service’s
new director, Abigail Kimbell, who took office in February 2007,
they shouldn’t. Kimbell says she wants to /increase/ fees.
Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). He is conservation editor of Fly Rod&Reel magazine
and frequently leaves his home in Vermont to travel the
West.
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