VISITATION DECLINES SPREAD FROM NATIONAL PARKS TO FORESTS
Fees Keeping People Off Their Land
When the public stops using public lands, who will be there to protect them?By Bill Schneider, 11-21-08
Wild Bill and grandson Alex, learning to fish in a mountain lake in the Gallatin National Forest. How long will it be free? Photo by Marnie Schneider.
As noted several times in this column, visitation to our national parks has been declining for years, partly because of steep increases in entrance fees and annual passes. While reading these stories, we suffered under the misperception that the problem was confined to the national parks while visitor use of our national forests continued to increase.
Now we know the truth. The wild proliferation of new and increased recreation fees has contributed to a similar if not steeper decline in the public use of public forests. With this aggressive, if not abusive, fee-charging policy, Forest Service bosses have done a stellar job of discouraging people from using their own land, the national forests.
A front-page article in the November 17 Oregonian exploded the myth and revealed that visitation had steadily decreased since 2001, the same year the Bush Administration took charge and started implementing its doctrine of subliminally commercializing our public land.
A dollar here, a dollar there, and seven years later, we have a 13 percent decline in visitor use nationally. In the Northern Region (mostly Idaho and Montana), use went down 15 percent, and the Rocky Mountain Region (mostly Colorado and Wyoming) got off easy with only a 5 percent drop. The Pacific Northwest Region experienced the deepest decline, 27 percent, which is no surprise because that’s where it all started.
(Click here for region-by-region stats.)
Back in 1995, during the Clinton Era, the Forest Service (FS) managed to tack a “demonstration project” onto a spending bill to test the concept of charging fees to use our national forests. The so-called “fee demo” program--or “recreation access tax” (RAT) to its distracters--was initially restricted to national forests of Oregon and Washington, but after being renewed several times, all without a vote of Congress, the RAT spread to other regions. Then, in 2004, in the last hours of the 108th Congress, the Bush Administration added a rider called the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA) to another must-pass spending bill making it the law of the land with no public input or vote of Congress. FLREA formalized Fee Demo as the official policy of federal land-managing agencies.
The result was a massive, nationwide expansion of recreation fees to enter and use our public land. In the past two years alone, the agencies have increased fees on 728 sites and added 232 new fee sites.
The Forest Service’s National Visitor Use Monitoring office prepared the report on declining visitor use. In the report and the Oregonian article, the FS cited multiple causes, especially high gas prices, for the decline, even acknowledging (for the first time I know of) that recreation fees might have been a contributing factor in the decline.
But after reviewing the report, Kitty Benzar of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, the chief opponent of charging fees to use public land, questioned that reasoning and put more blame on aggressive fee-charging.
“Fees were already driving many families away from public lands, even while times were good,” she told NewWest.Net. “The economic crisis we’re facing now will exacerbate a very worrisome trend. Declining visitation is bad for everyone, including the Forest Service.”
Benzar said the negative impact is most severe in rural communities that are transitioning from a declining wood products economy to a recreation-based, tourism-dependent economy. “The end result is that both urban and rural residents, especially kids, will spend more time indoors playing video games or watching TV because it costs too much to take the family camping or fishing.”
“As the prices rise, the demand decreases,” Scott Silver of Wild Wilderness, another nonprofit opposing commercialization of public land, told the Oregonian. “Why should anyone have not expected that? If people are really moving away from public lands, who is going to protect them?”
Hopefully, the Blue Tide arrived in time to reverse the trend before it’s too late. I can’t see recreation fees getting much priority from President-elect Obama, who has to concentrate on preventing global economic devastation, but reversing the trend of overzealous fee-charging should definitely be a top priority for the new agency bosses he puts in place, as it should for the new, blue, 111th Congress convening in January.
Footnote: For the entire Recreation Fee Chonology, click here.
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Whatever happened to the Baucus/Crapo bill?
There's other causes. One is the X-box generation. These people don't go camping on the weekends.
Another is that the recreation product offered for traditional users is vanishing. Sunday drive? Gate. Trail ride? Gate. Fishing? Gate. No access at any price in a lot of places, so why even bother?
Then there are the fees. Didn't need those when we logged and sold trees and subsidized multiple-use recreation infrastructure with the makings. So the USFS built up this edifice of ologists who cost money even when nothing happens with their ology. That's a budget-buster right there, so to keep the ologists employed, there has to be a source of revenue. Fees.
But you are right, nobody is going to give a RIP what happens to the agency if it doesn't produce a product people find worthwhile.
A pit toilet, one water spigot, and a designated spot with a table and a fire pit costing upwards of $20 a night does not sit well with the paying public. Not when you can rent a motel room for twice that with a shower, towels, and a tv. I my neck of the woods, campgrounds are managed by a private company that also runs a ski area on leased USFS land. Their intent is to provide year around employment for their labor force. The USFS intent is to have someone else do their work. But they bid that job in competition, and the competition is for your dollars, and the USFS takes a cut of the bid price and some of it stays in the local county. I don't know enough about the contract to maintain and supervise camp grounds, and if the collected fees are the sole source of money to the contractor.
The price goes up annually, and the amenities available decrease, annually. Wildland fire is but one reason for less visitation, and fewer areas open to recreational entry. Wilderness has finite visitor numbers, as do many Wild and Scenic Rivers. The income is a set figure, as are the annual visitor days. Putting your name on a list for the lottery to be able to visit or use a public resource is not a situation that will grow visitor use. The design is too LOWER visitor use days, and limit the number of people visiting proclaimed fragile wilderness and wild areas. By design.
Logging is no longer a viable alternative or subject for public lands. The markets have changed, the building methods, the products, the demand, all have changed or diminished. We are now building fewer homes than at any time since WWII. The ravages of WWII on European and Asian forests have been healed by new forests, and those forests are producing lumber for Europe and for export to the rest of the world. Japan is going to have to start cutting in their forests at a greater rate, as they mature. China is still hard at obtaining cheap timber from the criminal element in Asia and Africa, on the cheap, no questions asked, no regard for environmental consequences shown. So as beetles destroy forests by the millions of acres in the US and Canada, precious tropical forests continue to disappear, and habitat along with those forests. Lumber from US public lands is neither needed nor wanted. But I really do believe the public would like those forests intact, and not blackened by chronic fire, and acute funding shortages from the Congress. And I do believe the public would like more and better access, and fewer restrictions. This deal of extreme limits on commercial use of the public lands is part of the problem. More outfitters, more river guides, more active chaperoned, guided public use is better for the forests, and better for an emerging population that has not a clue how to live in and with the wildlands, and how to enjoy them, look at them, see them through others' eyes.
I was lucky enough to be in Scouting with a USFS Fire Administration Officer for a Scoutmaster. He had keys to gates and locks, and we used mothballed CCC buildings, lookout towers in winter, and had more fun than any kid should. We were mentored by someone who had spent countless hours hiking to one lightening struck tree just to cut it down, and fire trail around it, and put out the fire, and then hike back the way he had come, those trips sometimes taking the better part of three or four days. We learned what he had learned. And maybe, if we are lucky, we can pass that along to another generation, but only if we are allowed entry, are able to access the forests.
come to think of it- the way CEO's and corporate boards treated our forests very much resembles what corporate short term profit taking has done to the entire economy of our nation. shameful greed. "...why is the rich man dancin' while the poor man pays the band?..."
My wife got her senior pass last week and can't wait till next summer so she can pay half price, but I still don't want to camp in a trailer park.
It surprises me that when we drive about twenty miles up the canyons and find some beautiful isolated places where you just pull off the road and camp, nobody seems to want to camp there, so we have them all to ourselves.
People don't seem to mind paying $12 to $16 a night to camp on top of each other. They start coming up on thursday night, and by saturday morning the whole campground is packed. I guess that's how some people "get away from it all".
Particularly in these economic times, tax support of public lands is not enough...budget priorities will not be high enough...to sustain and protect the parks (I would argue that it hasn't been high enough for decades). Infrastructure is not being maintained, protection is not being enforced,... I say the public lands need all the help they can get and access fees are a help. And, yes, they reduce demand and use...but given what I see during each of my two anuual visits to Yellowstone, that is not altogether a bad thing.
People are now finding a different but desirable quality of life in the city and rural homesites will decline in value. The demographics of the US population is bimodal with respect to age – there are more older folks who find RV camping and urban amenities more comfortable than a tent; the younger crowd want thrills. Outdoor pursuits are destination oriented – park and play, motor sports are increasingly popular with twenty somethings. Significantly, the fee structure has not encouraged public lands agencies – especially the park service, to provide better quality service. They have spent more on law enforcement than interpretation and education. Not all the enforcement is needless. Public lands are increasingly under attack by slob users. ORVers are most often to blame but not exclusively.
Less demand for public lands is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that the fixed costs for management must still be met. The best and most efficient way to do that is to zone some semi wild areas with no trail maintenance, a wildfire policy that acknowledges the role of large burns, less road maintenance. Fee investment should be spent in areas where impacts can be concentrated and mitigated. Where special services are needed – plowed roads for winter access, river trailheads, popular trails we should be willing to pay for those services. One final note – it is clear that outfitters, who derive income from public resources, can pay more of their fair share of impacts and management.
does your community gain by your taking up space. Less access is a good thing? Do you work for a greenie NGO? your spiel sure sounds familiar.
Fee demo is a jobs program.
Your family vacation model is flawed because you left out most of the real costs once in the park. Its called fee layering. Entrance fee, lodging/food fee, transportation fee (winter), all inflated because you are paying the juice on the consession. So please tell me what you think is a fair rate.
The number of Mexican dope cartel clandestine grow operations, the incidence of armed guards, might be keeping some out of some areas. A cold winter with normal precip left the mountains with late snow last summer. The use period was short, the mosquitos fierce and numerous, and gas was pushing towards $5 a gallon. I would expect use to be lower.
The demographic that uses the forests is more implement oriented that perhaps has been the case in the past. Too many motorized whizits, mechanical aids, an exponential rise in personal watercraft of all types, have changed how people use the resource, and the old hikers are aging and not being replaced in our more than sedentary society. Fat people are not indicative of high outdoor resource use. And we are becoming a nation of fat people. I still think "The Triplets of Belleville", the animated movie, is the most revealing view of America and Americans from a foreign perspective out there. See that, and you will understand why public lands use is down. That is who were are, as seen by Europeans and Asians.
Fishing, in the past a food gathering venture, is now a catch and release sport, and not all find barbless fly only fishing to their liking. Add to that the cost of boats and fuel, along with just getting there, has to limit who is using lakes and larger rivers. And there is the purist "ologist" mindset no longer allowing stocking of high lakes (the fish eat native species), so hike in fishing opportunity is now much, much less than it was 50 years ago. Fishing interested kids. Photography and the mature mind's ability to appreciate the isolation and beauty is not quite what youngsters are all about. They want action. A creek to dam. A stick to cut. A fish to try to catch.
Even mountain biking needs roads to access trails at elevation to heighten the experience. A grind to the top and a short ride down is for only a few. Many trips down a trail is more of a hoot for many. Road closures and no maintenance is not going to solve use declines. That mindset exacerbates the decline.
Perhaps the whole deal is a "chicken or egg" first deal. But it did all begin when the public, not timber sales, had to finance the USFS recreation budget, fire budget, law enforcement budget. So it is up to the "changers in charge", the old Clinton appointees, now in control, to come up with the answers. I would look for more gates, more tank traps, less public access, more fires, larger fires, and a quite diminished resource in 4 years, one that will have lost even more devotees. Change can be the acceleration of decline in a sense. Go look at the web site "The Ruins of Detroit" (http://www.detroityes.com) to see how change has improved (or not) America's industrial engine. Maybe that is what our public lands are destined to look like after 4 more years of WFU and AMR. The Ruins of Public Lands: The Untended Commons.
Regarding the forest fees, most folks I know either are not aware of them at all (perhaps like Tom) or simply choose to ignore them. I have never once been asked to prove that I had paid a fee. I, like Tom, camp in out of the way places away from the rip-off campgrounds.
Kids that camp and fish and hunt with their parents are probably going to stay interested, at least that seems to be the case with my family. A grandson in the Navy arranges his leave to come home and go hunting with the family, at least he has while stationed stateside.
Folks from cities are often afraid of being out by themselves. Once I was getting a camp spot at the North rim of Grand Canyon, and got the last one. Another couple were behind me and became very upset when told they could camp in the forest anywhere outside of the park boundaries. They were terrified of being alone. I gave them my spot and I parked in the nice quiet myself. It meant an extra half hour to get to watch sunrise over the Canyon the next morning, but it was a beautiful evening and I had a beautiful place to camp. Now if I had to walk across a parking lot in a shopping center in a city at night, THAT would be scary!
I wonder how these national surveys compare with more rigorously collected information on outfitted recreation? And it's well known that the river permits for the limited entry rivers more than sell out annually. Finally, I agree with jdj that the site fees are a minor factor in the total recreation and travel costs. We need to keep those fees in perspective to what we are truly out of pocket every time we visit the local National Forest.
I would love to see these fees disappear, as well as all other fees
and taxes for that matter. But I'm realistic about it. Maybe instead of crying about the existence of these fees, we should concentrate our efforts on making sure that first: the feds recognize where this money is coming from (hikers, campers, mountain bikers, photographers, wildlife watchers.....as well as hunters and fisherman), and second: that they are spending it appropriately.
I was hoping that as my wife and I get older and her artificial knee and back surgery make it harder to walk in to places, we would get a four wheeler, but I'm so against the destruction to stream beds and banks and hills and even private property and just plain lack of respect for anyone and anything, I wan't to see them banned in the forests.
If you want to reform the outfitter business such that they operate in an open market I would say fine, let outfitting compete on price like other services without the property right of the operating permit. The highly subsidized and pro industry structure now in existence seems to favor collusion among outfitters and that offers an incentive to keep fees low.
And no, I do not work for a nonprofit. As to your virtuous place in the world because you provide some fleeting enjoyment to people using your subsidized SRP – good on you but please refrain from stating your position at my expense. It makes you appear small and petty.
Let's get real. We live in a world where folks don't bat an eye about plopping down a couple of hundred bucks to go to a football game... and NFL stadiums are filled to capacity every Sunday; or shelling out three or four hundred clams for a day at Disneyland. Heck a night at the movies is easily fifty or sixty dollars with tickets, popcorn and sodas! Or forking up thirty bucks for a blue ray disk to watch at home. I just don't believe they are drawing the line at an eighty dollar annual unlimited use America the Beautiful Pass. You can argue all day about whether it is "right" to charge fees to visit public land, but I don't think the fees are stopping anyone from doing so.
Celia Bell
Tell me again why the outfitted public needs to pay and you don't.
your rant is really about allocated use. Why didn't you use the Grand Canyon fees as an example? I have no property right to my permit and you know it. Are you feeling a bit stung because common poll didn't work out? I provide a service, I pay a fee to operate on public lands. How much should it be, 3%, 10%, 20%.
You are right about my first post...it was a bit harsh. I'm sorry.
As we displace millions of Americans by allowing companies to import lower cost foreign labor to replace us through H1-B and L-1 visas and the real unemployment rate in the country passes 13-15% (over 21 million Amerricans), of course we're going to have fewer people able to afford even the most rudimetary and inexpensive family trip. Sure gas expense can be an additional challenge, but as someone displaced from work and struggling with family costs, the logic that high gas prices make park entrance and campground fees less significant seems stunningly insensitive.
Like many who have responded, my attendance at campgrounds has been way down, but increasingly the Forest Service has followed the National Park Service's lead, banning camping in many of the alternative sites nearby. This is done allegedly to minimize imapact, although some measure of both reduced campground usage and the increased impact outside of campgrounds is a direct result from the increased fees.
In order to camp and fish in California I maintain the Federal Lands Pass (price up 60% in the past 3 years alone), a California State Park Pass (price up over 300% in the past 5 years), a myriad of fishing licenses, puch cards and stamps, and I still have to avoid county and department of water and power lands with entry or user fees. Many Federal lands such as Devil's Postpile National Monument do not accept the Federal Lands Pass, claiming that they need my money to fund shuttle service (even if I pay for camping and cannot and will not use the shuttles).
With the net effect of all of these various agencies competing to milk us for funds separately, in addition to the funds they take directly from our paychecks and purchases (sales tax), lower income families have effectively been banned from public lands.
Now currently some of us may smugly consider that a benefit, but many current and future retirees will increasingly find themselves in a difficult financial situation due to diminishing Social Security funds. That situation is only going to get worse as the calculation of current cost of living numbers has been changed to under-report actual increases by 50% (already today current payments would have to be increased 100% to equal in real goods what was paid only a couple of decades ago).
Furthermore, the current world economy is essentially broken and as a result many economists are forecasting a another Great Depression, but with one extremely worse aspect: whereas the past Great Depression involved deflation, so what dollars you had went further while times were bad, this time around the U.S. Dollar is losing ground as the world's default currency, and hyperinflation that could effectivley wipe out most of the value of your money and assets is a real possibility.
We pay high state and federal government income taxes (which didn't even exist until a few decades ago), sales taxes, gasoline taxes, excise taxes, and now individual agencies decide to pay for their unnecessary overhead by taxing us more through their own redundant and skyrocketing fees. Few of us can afford this incredible multi-tiered wealth-sucking infrastructure.
As we continue to ship manufacturing and jobs overseas then need loans from foreign countries such as China to fund the resulting trade defecit and national debt, the strength of the dolalr erodes. We still think we're wealthy. We just haven't seen the bill come due yet. Over the next 2-4 years we may just get a front row seat to see that day arrive.
By the way, the comments about the "-ologitsts" are pretty far from reality. The Fish and Wildlife Service for example has been gutted over the last 8 years under the Bush Administation. A friend of mine worked there until recently and some offices have gone from 6 biologists to 1. If you're wondering where your tax dollars are going and why agencies need to backfill with higher fees to keep operating, look to the Department of Defense. That's what the Income Tax was made permanent to fund, and currently about 54% of your federal dollars end up there, directly or to pay interest on war debt. We outspend the rest of the world put together, and every year we still fall for the alarmist tale that a few more hundred billion are required to keep us safe (even while several trillion dollars of those funds can't be accounted for every year, as Donald Rumsfeld admitted shortly before 9/11). So the country keeps borrowing, and politicians keep spending wildly, hoping that they'll simply be out of office when the music stops. The current banking crisis is only a prelude to the results that this policy will deliver into our laps.
In the meantime, it's not a prudent strategy to have a cavalier attitude about increased government fees.
So we are to recover the economy by taxing some rich guys, and building some public works. That works only if the public works create income, produce a good or service. Dams making electricity that produced aluminum in quantity and provided power to the rural areas, and ran the vacuum cleaners, the toaster, the radio, brought us out of the Great Depression and allowed the USA to prevail in WWII. We made stuff. We don't make stuff anymore. We import stuff. Big difference.
So not developing natural resources so we can make something because welfare here pays more than middle management offshore is not going to fix our economy, nor will it make fees to use lands the public already owns go away. The rich might get taxed a tad more, but the middle class will get taxed into extinction because their jobs are fleeing like a mugger in the night.
I can hardly believe how dire the straits of America are because not enough people will buy enough stuff they mostly don't need in the next 5 days. Nor can I find enough venal to say about the bankers who outsmarted themselves, and we took the fall, while Congress bails them out. The guy pumping gas has bills he can't pay, and nobody cares less. But pampered, coddled, lifetime layabouts of the union auto workers might lose their benefits, and here comes the Democrat cavalry to rescue their jobs, pensions, and welfare packages. The unspoken truth is that is the reason the companies are failing. Legacy costs. The union gets the first $2000 or more of every car made. Hard to compete in the world market with that millstone around your economic neck. So the hardest working lose, and those with their golden heads up their golden asses get bailed out by those who can least afford it. Change? I don't see change. I see the death by a thousand new taxes and business fees, charges, licenses, use fees, ad nauseum.
I have news for the policy makers. Nobody wants their partner to have more than half of whatever it is they share. Uncle Sammie ain't gonna get more than half, because Uncle Sammie's partners will steal from him, short him, deal him under the table, collude against him, cheat him, go offshore to evade him and his revenoooers. Just how it works. And how it has worked in Europe for a century. And how it works in China, and they will hang you for it if they catch you.
If I go to an Oregon State Park, and rent a yurt, I expect to pay close to a motel rent. But to park a camper or pitch a tent, with a community one holer (albeit now much nicer with the cement floor and big vent pipe), a hose bib that is always turned off during hunting season (frost free must not be in the design), or better, a pitcher pump, and a cement fire pit with a cast iron grill is not worth motel prices. What you are paying for is use. If you use it, you must pay. The government owns it, but only the people who use it pay. Too bad your use receipt is not a ballot, a vote, by which you can determine policy. The people who DON'T pay, don't get to make the policy, or have a say in it. I would feel better. Pay to play, and pay to make policy.
The sad deal about all this is that by the time the snows melt, and the new growth of spring in upon us, who knows where this economy will be? Who will be left standing to have the time, the money, to use public lands? We don't know now. And summer is a long ways off. I do know I won't be staying at a couple of the hotels in Bombay...excuse....Mumbai..and for that I am thankful that our problems are not that severe, not that insane, not that intractable. Damned thankful to have what I have, and thankful the police or the military is not at the door to take it. I have apples pies going in the oven in minutes, and the turkey will be stuffed before dawn, and in the oven. Can a guy be any luckier? Good family, great spouse, and fine kids. And the weather forecast is for severe clear for the next few days. GO BEAVERS!!!!!
As far as fees are concerned I do not like the way the USFS has increased campground fees. TheUSFS has gone to a campground host program where a private individual bids on the campground. Some hosts have been ok others think they own the campground and treat it like a private RV park.Bad part of this is the USFS is privatizing public land.They even make reservations like a hotel.The USFS has forgotten who they work for....us!