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Fee Programs

Fees for public lands a medieval concept

By Penelope Purdy, member of Denver Post Editorial Board

Tuesday, June 19, 2001 - Get ready to pay through the nose to use your public lands - and expect to see more commercial development and hear more noisy motor vehicles in our forests, desert canyons and grasslands. Congress is set to re-up the so-called Fee Demonstration Program, which requires citizens to pay to even walk onto their own public lands. While the fees apply to only certain locations now, conservative think tanks and big corporations want Congress to expand the program and make it permanent. Ultimately, if these special interests have their way, people may have to pay every time they hike or picnic.

By making four agencies - the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and Fish and Wildlife Service - increasingly dependent on the fees, Congress will push the agencies toward decisions that produce the most money, and away from the management choices that protect the long-term health of the ecosystems. Wildlife habitat, solitude, biological diversity - these crucial concepts are devalued in bottom-line accounting.

The insidious policy was supposed to expire two years ago, but it's being kept alive by corporate political forces who could profit handsomely if citizens grow accustomed to paying for recreation on public lands. Advocates include the makers of snowmobiles and dirt bikes, who want to see more and more of the machines roaring along our back country trails; the concessionaires who run for-profit campgrounds; and Disney. Gee, what a theme park our wilderness areas could be made into, complete with Jurassic Park-style rides! What profits could be made if fishing and hunting access were reserved only for those willing to pay private-club level fees!

Far-fetched? Hardly. Consider this memo, written by the American Recreation Coalition, the political group pushing for more public land fees: "Have we fully explored our gold mine of recreational opportunities in this country and managed it as if it were consumer-brand products? As we transition from providing outdoor recreation at no cost to the consumer to charging for access and services, we can expect to see many changes in the way we operate. Selling a product, even to an eager consumer, is very different from giving it away."

The first step, of course, is to get people used to paying for something that is rightfully theirs to begin with - a psychological task that the fee-demo program accomplishes effectively. After the public gets softened up, citizens won't whine as much as the fees grow more expensive.

It's not just campgrounds and the like being affected. In one California wilderness, citizens already have to pay just to day hike on the national forest, and the waiting list for a reservation for a hiking permit is many months long.

Regardless of what word games the bureaucrats play, these fees are entrance fees, because if you don't pay them before you enter, you'll face major fines.

When Congress started the program in 1996, each of the four agencies involved could collect fees only at 50 sites. Now it's up to 100 per agency, including five in Colorado, such as Vail Pass and the Maroon Bells. But there will be no limit on the number of fee sites under a measure just passed by the House Appropriations Committee.

When the fee-demo program was put in place during the Clinton administration, it was heralded as a way to help fund needed repairs and allow the areas collecting the fees to keep the cash. On the surface, the idea seemed reasonable, but the real-life consequences are alarming.

Whenever public agencies become dependent on a source of revenue, they promote that use over all other interests. For example, for years the Forest Service's budget was determined largely by how many trees the agency let the lumber companies cut. The result: So much clear-cutting occurred that forest eco-systems were nearly ruined.

So now Congress wants to make land-management agencies dependent on money from motorized recreation, concessionaires and other commercial recreation development. What are the odds that the agencies soon will be promoting loud, costly recreation, to the detriment of all other uses?

Despite the glowing reports that the agencies file with Congress each year, even areas that collect fees still suffer from disrepair. Trails are poorly signed, bridges are frightfully unstable, privies are overflowing and picnic tables and campsites rare and often vandalized. Meantime, the fees have let bureaucrats build an awful lot of fancy entrance stations and assign a lot of employees to do nothing more than collect money.

The very concept of paying fees to use public lands flies in the face of what these wide-open spaces have been and should remain: places that belong to the American people, where everyone has access and where everyone is welcome. The fee program turns that ideal on its head and makes the public's domain a private reserve. It shreds the American concept of the wilderness and other open lands as a national heritage, and revives the medieval notion of the king's land - places where we peasants aren't welcome.

Congress should kill the fee-demo program. If public lands need additional funding, then this Congress - which was bragging about a budget surplus not long ago - should just budget the money.