I am one of the critics of public-land user fees that Interior Secretary Gale Norton referred to in a recent Denver Post guest commentary that praised the federal fee program.
Norton tries to blur the distinction between the national parks and the vast tracts of undeveloped land managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Entrance fees at national parks have never been part of this debate.
Instead, the issue is whether Americans should be charged just to drive through a national forest, to park at a trailhead and go for a hike, to use a picnic table at a Bureau of Land Management scenic overlook, or to reach undeveloped backcountry.
The trial fee program touted by Norton as an “enormous success” (called fee demo) authorized fees for all of those things, and was one of the most unpopular changes to public land policy in our history. Fee demo couldn’t have survived an honest legislative process. Instead, it was buried in a huge spending bill.
Over the eight-year life of fee demo, four state legislatures (New Hampshire, Colorado, Oregon and California), dozens of county and municipal governments, hundreds of organizations, and thousands of ordinary citizens went on record as vehemently opposed to it. Visitation to public lands declined, and non-compliance with the fees ran rampant. In California alone, more than 250,000 citations or notices of non-compliance were issued to citizens who refused to buy a pass just to enter a national forest.
Yet Norton claims that “the program worked so well that Congress last year passed the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act.” Here’s the actual story:
Knowing that a permanent fee bill stood no chance of passing on its own merits, Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio – who has no federal public lands in his district – used a parliamentary sleight of hand to bury the FLREA in last year’s omnibus spending bill, the same way he had buried fee demo and all its renewals over the years.
So now we have the FLREA, better known as the Recreation Access Tax or RAT. Norton says RAT restricts fees to only developed areas and that no one will be charged for general access to national forests or BLM land. She’s proud to announce that the Forest Service is dropping fees at more than 400 sites that don’t meet the requirements in the RAT.
But by their own documentation, of the 480 sites where the Forest Service is claiming to be dropping fees, more than half were never fee demo sites to begin with, were already closed, or are still charging fees. The BLM has yet to drop a single fee area.
The Forest Service still has fees at almost 4,500 sites, and the BLM operates many fee projects as well. Many of these fees apply to huge areas and amount to de facto entrance fees, in violation of the new law. Others are a charge merely for parking, or for access to undeveloped backcountry, or for travel through a fee area on a public roadway or trail, all violations of the RAT.
In New Hampshire, citizens must display a pass to park at more than 50 sites in the White Mountain National Forest. In Colorado, the state highway to the top of Mount Evans is operated as a Forest Service toll road and an entrance fee is charged for the Arapaho National Recreation Area. The BLM is charging for backcountry access at Grand Gulch in Utah, Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness in Arizona, and Gunnison Gorge in Colorado.
Elected governments are already weighing in against the RAT. State legislatures in Colorado, Montana, Oregon and Alaska have called for its repeal, and more are pending.
If Secretary Norton and her counterparts at the Department of Agriculture are so sure that Americans are willing and anxious to pay fees to use our Forest Service and BLM lands, they should submit the idea to open public debate, congressional hearings and a recorded vote. Instead, they have subverted the legislative process to force a fundamental policy change on us against our will. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Robert Funkhouser is president of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition.
