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Fee Programs

Opponents span spectrum when it comes to user fees

Ron C. Judd / Times staff columnist; Sunday, April 01, 2001, 12:00 a.m. Pacific

Some of them are grandmas. One's a trail-crew boss. They're old and young, rich and poor, liberal and conservative, fat and thin, male and female.

And all very hacked off.

Last week's column protesting user fees on federal lands confirmed something I've long suspected: Opposition to federal user fees such as the Northwest Forest Pass (a $5 daily or $30 annual parking permit for Forest Service trailheads) runs a lot deeper, and is becoming more widespread, than most people think.

E-mail rolled in from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Utah, Arizona - all across the West. The message: Fee opponents are gaining strength. And they're getting closer to critical mass.

That might surprise some people in important places. Federal land managers seem to have successfully convinced Congress that people who refuse to pay to walk across land they already own are fringe lunatics: Tree-hugging enviros, on the left end of the spectrum, anti-government zealots on the right. They might be right. But they'd be sadly remiss in ignoring the growing - and seething - center.

Radicals?

Look at the list of organizations criticizing user fees in their current form: Those plotting seditionists called the Mountaineers. Radical whacko bastions like Washington Trails Association, a huge group of hikers who already complete, for free, most trail maintenance on Forest Service land. The Columbia Gorge and Rainier chapters of the National Audubon Society. The Inland Empire Chapter of the Backcountry Horsemen of Washington. And more than 200 other groups in 20 states.

Fringe? This is the outdoor world's mainstream.

Opposition to user fees spans the political spectrum. I'd never presume to speak for them, but I'm guessing they share a few basic beliefs:

A nation with enough loose change in its drawers to crank out a $4 billion white-elephant aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, can afford to repair switchbacks in the Rogue River Drainage.

A government rushing to implement a $1.6 trillion tax cut, disproportionately benefiting the nation's rich, can afford to replace footlogs over the Twisp River.

No country with a $2 trillion annual budget and any shred of a soul can, in any good conscience, continue to charge its people 5 bucks a day to watch water flow over Franklin Falls.

Shifting the funding burden for outdoor recreation from a progressive source (income tax) to a regressive tax (user fees) denies people of what, in this nation, has always been a basic right.

Last week's discussion of this issue ended with a simple challenge: "Maybe most of you don't have a problem with this. If that's the case, keep on doing nothing. It's working beautifully."

Some readers were angered by that.

"It infuriates me that this sort of fiscal abuse is going on," one of the more polite respondents wrote. "What would you recommend as the most direct, effective approach to responding to this abuse of our money? I'm looking for specific guidance, i.e., write to whom?"

And I thought no one would ever ask. The homework list:

1) E-mail or phone your Congressional representatives. And don't just whine about user fees. Make sure the representative you're writing also knows that you demand a permanent level of funding for recreation on federal lands sufficient to prevent this kind of nonsense well into the future.

The contact list (clip and save for future D.C. atrocities):

. Sen. Patty Murray (D): 202-224-2621, 206-553-5545; senator_murray@murray.senate.gov

. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D): 202-224-3441, 206-220-6400; http://cantwell.senate.gov/mailform.html

. For a list of contact information and e-mail links to Washington's nine Congressional representatives, see: http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.html

. To use the Forest Service official fee-demo comment form, go to: http://www.fs.fed.us/recreation/fee_demo/commentform.html

2) Join the growing fee-protest party. Anti-fee groups such as Wild Wilderness of Bend, Ore., provide huge amounts of fee-related documents online. (If you're just interested in personal protest tips, go directly to the "What can we do?" link.) Not all fee opponents share this group's level of concern that Disney is about to take over the U.S. Forest Service, but it's right on the money when it comes to user fees. Other online resources: www.freeourforests.org, www.freeourparks.org.

3) Other options: Ask vendors to stop selling passes. (A boycott threat by an Oregon fee-opponent group prompted some local retailers to drop the permits.) Or, if you dare, commit civil disobedience and refuse to pay the fee. You risk being fined $50 if you park in a Northwest Forest Pass lot without displaying a permit. But forest users all around the country have seen charges dismissed by judges shocked that U.S. attorneys don't have something better to do.

Good luck. And keep us posted.

Remember: Whatever you do to protest walking across land you already own, do it with the knowledge that you're not alone.