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Fee Programs

Drop the fee

Arizona Star
Saturday, 23 September 2000

For those who groan every time they encounter the tollbooth on the road up Mount Lemmon, there was some good news this week. A federal court judge dismissed criminal charges against five persons who had refused to pay a fee to visit a national forest. [Story with details on the dismissal]

In the past, we supported this fee. However, the manner in which the fee has been imposed and the fact the federal budget is swollen with a surplus persuades us that this fee should be eliminated.

Those who refused to pay the $5 toll were protesting the Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, an invidious scheme that allows the Forest Service to charge citizens a day use fee for driving up the mountain to hike or picnic, and imposes a second fee for staying overnight in established campgrounds.

The rationale for this program is this: Congress simply wasn't funneling enough tax dollars into the agencies that run our national parks and national forests, and as a result various amenities were deteriorating. The solution our congressmen came up with was equally simple: Let's impose new taxes on people who want to go into their national forests to picnic, hike, or camp, but let's not call it a tax.

The program, approved as a temporary experiment in 1996, in practice constitutes an admissions fee for anyone visiting Mount Lemmon. If you do nothing more than drive up the mountain to see the maples changing color at Bear Wallow and stop for a picnic lunch, you've got to buy a ticket at the tollbooth at Molino Basin. We find it remarkable that more people have not rebelled sooner. The Forest Service claims that 75 percent of the visitors to Mount Lemmon are paying the fee without complaint.

Those who support the fee demonstration program justify these new taxes on grounds that funds collected here will be used locally. In other words, the money collected on Mount Lemmon will be used on Mount Lemmon for cleaner restrooms, better picnic areas, trail maintenance, and so forth, which invites an obvious question: Aren't we supposed to get those amenities in exchange for being nice little taxpayers all year long?

One young mother recently experienced the absurdity of this ill-advised fee program when she drove up Mount Lemmon to bring her daughter home from the Girl Scout camp.

She hadn't paid any fee going up the mountain because, after all, she wasn't there for any purpose other than to pick up her child. On the way down, the woman stopped to use a restroom while her 14-year-old daughter waited in the car. A forest ranger approached and began writing a ticket. The teenager explained that her mother had just gone to use the bathroom. Too late, said the ranger; you can't use the facilities without paying the fee.

For this "infraction," the woman can be prosecuted and fined between $100 and $5,000, depending upon whether her "offense" was treated as civil or criminal. The defendants acquitted this week had been prosecuted as criminals.

With any luck, citizens who use our national forests and recoil at such opportunistic chicanery will begin applying the pressure where it belongs, with politicians so insulated by the myopia of Washington that they've lost sight of the need to provide adequate funding for our beleaguered land management agencies.

If, as the Forest Service contends, the fees are so popular, why not make them voluntary? Doing that would enable individuals who want to contribute more than the posted fees - and such individuals definitely exist - a mechanism for doing so, while simultaneously decriminalizing those individuals who oppose the fees.

No one doubts that the Forest Service, the National Park Service and the federal Bureau of Land Management need more money to accommodate pressure from the influx of citizens using the outdoors for recreation. But Forest Service Chief Michael Dombeck's solution is to regard outdoor recreation on public lands as a commodity instead of looking more closely at the way that money in the national treasury is distributed.

On Wednesday the House and Senate Interior Appropriations conference committee approved another one year extension to the Fee Demonstration Program. The extension had been opposed by the Sierra Club and more than 150 other conservation groups that want to see the program eliminated. But President Clinton can still intervene - though it is hardly likely that he will - before he signs the bill into law. Conservation groups are urging him to expunge the Fee Demonstration Program from the bill before he signs it. In addition, two stand-alone bills which would make the forest fees a permanent feature in the nation's landscape are still marinating. They stand little hope of passage this year, but conservationists still consider them a threat.

President Clinton and members of Congress need to learn, as quickly as possible, that many of us who use our national forests are appalled by the forest fees.

With this year's federal budget surplus anticipated to total about $115 billon, and the projected surplus over the next 10 years expected to go well over $2 trillion, it seems strange, at best, to hear politicians say that they can't possibly support the Forest Service without squeezing ordinary citizens for more fees. The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program should be eliminated and replaced with a program that invites voluntary contributions.