STRETCHING THE LAW NOT GOOD POLICY
FS Digging Its Own Grave
By Bill Schneider, 4-26-07
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This week, I posted two major articles on the U.S. Forest Service’s (FS) recreational fee policies and implementation of the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA)--the Recreation Access Tax (RAT) to opponents. In one, U.S. Senator Max Baucus (D-MT) talks of introducing a bill to repeal FLREA and the other details how the FS has been overly aggressive and loose with the truth in implementing the law on Mount Evans in Colorado.
Both articles sort of say the same thing. The FS is digging its own grave. And I’m not referring to the well-meaning, hard-working, budget-deprived FS employees in Colorado and elsewhere, only their Beltway bosses with their misguided political mission.
A sane approach to recreation fees would win support from most public land users, but that’s not what we have right now. The current trend can only lead to a Congressional fix the FS bosses might not like, but that FS employees might welcome.
Not many people mind paying a reasonable fee to camp in a developed campground or enjoy an interpretive center, but designating large areas as High Impact Recreation Areas (HIRAs) and charging entrance fees not only violates FLREA, flies in the face of the spirit and tradition of public lands.
HIRAs are little more than the FS’s attempt to make national parks out of the national forests. FLREA specifically disallows the FS from charging for access to national forests, for driving through them, for parking in them, and for dispersed recreation like hiking or hunting, but by creating HIRAs, which are at best a shameful end-run around the law, the FS does exactly that, exactly what the law prohibits.
Then, the agency has the audacity to say it isn’t doing it, claiming it’s “charging for the amenities,” which are defined by law to be permanent physical structures, like nature centers, picnic areas and public restrooms (not porta-potties), and campgrounds, not for access to hundreds of thousands of acres of public land.
On Mount Evans, for example, the FS charging everybody who enter the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest. This has been going on for ten years or more, including the past two years after FLREA was slipped into the law as a rider on a must-pass spending bill in December 2004. Only after a few locals who knew the law and their rights complained bitterly did the FS give out a “pink pass” for them to enter without paying, but then, had a ranger follow them looking for a reason to write a ticket.
The FS won’t put up a sign or verbally tell people about the option of not paying for their trip up Mount Evans to look at the scenery or go hiking. Only after being challenged did the FS admitted it will let people enter without paying--“if they ask,” but let’s be real. How many people will go to a toll booth and ask if they can pass through without paying when they don’t even know they have the option?
As a frequent user of the national forests, I’m embarrassed to even know that the agency managing my lands would behave like this.
Again, on Mount Evans, which is only one site but happens to be an excellent example of what’s going wrong in the FS, I have a personal experience to confirm the above, that the agency is not being truthful with its customers. In 2005, I tried to ride my bicycle to the top of Mount Evans, and I had no idea there was a fee to enter the national forest. Why would I think this? It’s against the law, and I’ve been in national forests all over the West and never encountered a single toll booth, until I tried to ride my bike on State Highway 5 through the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest. But there it was. A toll booth right smack in the middle of the state highway. I stopped and asked, “what’s this?”
The not-so-pleasant lady scowled at me and said, “Three dollars.” I told her I didn’t have any money with me and all I wanted to do was ride my bike up the road and back, but she would not let me pass.
Now, I hear from several FS officials that I really wouldn’t have had to pay because I wasn’t “using the amenities.” That might be the company line from the corner office, from behind Gifford Pinchot’s desk in the Old Auditor’s Building in D.C., but that’s not what they say down at the toll booth.
When you stand back and look what’s happening, not just at Mount Evans but throughout the national forest system, it seems like the Forest Service just wants to be the National Park Service, but national forests aren’t national parks. National forests have a strong tradition of free access, and the recent attempts by the FS to change that and run them as “enterprises” (translate, like businesses) is simply failed policy that has never had the support of Congress or the public land users.
I feel for FS employees. They can’t hide in the Beltway. They frequent the frontline where they feel the scorn. They pay the full price of this failed policy. incentive to raise their own money with fees and make them defenders of an ill-conceived system, which sometimes pays their salaries. I’m sure most would agree with me--in silence, of course--when I say we should return to the old system of getting decent budget through the normal appropriations process to manage recreation on national forests.
Hello, political bosses of the FS, the old system worked for 90 years. Now, you’ve had ten years of dismal failure to prove the full-cost-recovery system doesn’t work for public lands that are considered a free tradition by the people who own them, so let’s go back to doing it right. Compared to other line items in the federal budget, adequately funding recreation management the old way in our national forests is not only inexpensive, but people will actually like something you did.
Footnote: I’m proud of myself for making it through that entire article without saying the words, “Trillion Dollar War.”
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Comments
So the Florist Service is now derailed at Injunction Junction, the drivers spinning in the air. There is no longer a big picture Ranger running a Ranger District, reporting to the SO, who has to look good at the annual Supervisors' meeting with the Regional Forester, who was really an auditor. Not today. A Ranger is some ethnic gender diversity slot filler pining to be the top dog in D.C., and cannot make a decision without three years of meetings, and at least one Kumbayah sing along. By the time a decision has to be made, the Ranger is long gone to fill the next gender race sexual preference slot at the SO or Region, and a new round of meetings needs to take place. The decision is rarely made. Any decision.
All the chest thumping about the end of logging on the FS lands and the annual reductions in grazing, did not produce one red cent of funds to keep the agency running. Add to that a conflagration risk of their own making, and the fire fighting rat hole that seems to have consumed all the collected reserves from timber sales past (when you bought USFS timber, you paid for the logs, and paid deposits to fund reforestation, thinning, pest control, slash disposal for twenty or more years in the future--KV Funds-Knudsen-Vandenburg if my memory serves me, and road use, slash disposal and sundry little tax gouges) and you have an entity that pissed away the seed money at the Environmental Faire. Bought Spotted Owl very incomplete research, hook, line and global warming sinker, and in their own brand of gross neglect, have managed to let WFU burn more than 1.5 million acres of heritage forests saved in the name of Spotty, only to discover Spotty is bearing babies with Barred Owls, or Barred Owl thugs are running Spotty out of his area, which turns out to be forest edge which supports the most robust prey base. NO KIDDING!!! Well, no logging came with a caveat: no revenue. The Piss Fir Willies (as in Wm. Jefferson Clinton--One Eyed Willie) cut off their own funding, devolved their own agency, and now want recreationists to pay for their retirement. Good Luck. A load of logs will pay to pump a pit toilet for a summer. Two loads will keep it pumped for the year. A load of logs buys several dump truck loads of gravel, or a half dozen picnic tables. Loggers are required to maintain and grade haul routes, pay for rock replacement, and in addition, have to replace rock in damage areas. The PissFir Willies now have at least one motor patrol of their own for every, oh, half million acres of land they administer. That is an emergency room with one bed and two bandaids. In name only. USFS road maintenance is in name only. They have been behind since the logging shut down, and their answer to is "obliterate" or "decommission" roads. If a road is no longer a road, in name only, then it is not road failure when the non-maintained culverts plug and the road washes out. A joke. It is now a joke. They are a joke. America has its own national joke: National Forests.
But, good readers, fellow Americans, and lovers of the out of doors, the USFS is YOUR USFS, of YOUR design and making, and they are behaving and doing exactly as you wished them to do with the lawsuits, administrative rules, and all the regulatory acts that have tied them up in some sort of bondage ritual that has both sides whipping each other and enjoying it, or that is my interpretation because there has yet to be any Congressional attempts to make any course corrections to enable a tack towards the sane side of the journey. Meanwhile, we can all share in the strange curiousity and thrill of watching it all burn, which is the plan whether you believe it or not. That is the new deal in public land management: burn it all. Allow it, set it, and take no responsibility. "Burned, Black and Beautiful--Your National Forests."