RAT REMAINS DURING APPEAL
Local Media Turns on FS over Mount Lemmon Fee
By Bill Schneider, 12-15-06
I could videotape myself singing these lyrics and give you a link to YouTube.com, but that would probably cost NewWest.net a lot of readers and advertisers, so I’ll just write it down.
This land is your land, this land is my land,
From California, to the New York Island,
From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters,
This land was made for you and me.
Somebody really needs to sing this to the Forest Service.
As reported last September on NewWest.net, the Forest Service took a big hit in its frenzy to charge more and bigger fees when a Tucson judge ruled that the agency was operating outside the law, the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act (FLREA). Did this change anything? Hardly. Instead of listening to the judge, the FS appealed the ruling--and continued to charge the exact same fees the judge considered illegal. Nor has the Mount Lemmon situation changed any policy anywhere in the agency.
Can you say “denial”?
Now, Billie Stanton, an editorial page editor for the Tucson Citizen, has blasted the federal agency in a pointed editorial, Mount Lemmon Fee A Real Lemon.
“In the West of yesteryear,” she writes, “the wizened old prospector cocked his shotgun and warned, ‘Get off of my land.’ In today's West, citizens just want to get onto their land without paying admission.”
Stanton goes on to explain the current situation. She tried to get the FS to explain their actions, but the agency refused to comment.
The case started when local legal secretary Christine Wallace refused to pay a $5 fee to park along a state highway through a national forest to go hiking. FLREA allows the FS to charge fees to sites that have significant improvements like visitor centers or improved campgrounds, but specifically prohibits charging for parking or for entering areas without improvements to hike, bike, climb or lean against a tree and become one with nature.
But this prohibition didn’t stop the FS. The agency did an embarrassingly transparent end run of the law by designating large areas, such as the Mount Lemmon area, as High Impact Recreation Areas, so they could charge entrance fees. In essence, this allows them to charge for all activities, including hiking, bird-watching, climbing, bicycling and everything else, including parking along a road to do partake in these non-consumptive outdoor activities. Such is the case with the Mount Lemmon HIRA where Wallace received her citations.
Stanton quoted Kitty Benzar, co-founder of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition who explained that in testimony during the appeal the FS said it doesn’t consider it “a fee for parking, but it's a fee we enforce by way of parking.”
Huh? Perhaps a FS expert in these matters can use the comment section on this article to tell us how parking is not parking.
I like the way Stanton concluded her editorial: “Surely, the day federal policy prevents our poorest citizens from enjoying their public lands is a fine day to go to court. I suggest federal officials take their fee stations off of our land.”
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Comments
What is happening is a simply supply verses demand model. Access to recreation is in fact supply. And if you can control supply, you can control demand... AND if you contol demand, you control prices.
That is what economy is all about folks. This is how the game is played. It is the same with oil, it is the same with gold, it is the same with campgrounds or hiking trails or even muishrooms and huckleberry bushes.
Given the land area of millons of acres here on the Wenatchee National Forest, there is essentially unlimited supply for camping if they wanted to make it available. But of course, there is in fact a hidden agenda to turn our forests in to a profit making industry where eventually the wealthy will be given precedence and the common people will be left in the smog and pollution of the cities.
If you can shut down campgrounds, you effectively constrict supply... and demand goes up. And then you can charge more money for the few campgrounds you left open.
It is an issue of efficency. it is all about cutting costs. Why manage 10 campgrounds generating $5 per parking area when you can limit access, increase demand, and charge $50 per parking area are allowed to camp?
You say, well, "I just will not go camping". But of the 1000 people who were originally camping, 100 of them (10 percent) make a very high salary and the new $50 fee is nothing to them. That 10 percent or 100 people pay the fee without question. And so they don't care if the other 900 of you refuse to go camping.
They still filled up the one campground they left open!
They only need 100 of the original 1000 to pay the higher fee.
The forest service is making the same amount of money but only needs one-tenth the staff.
Folks, you all need to understand how supply and demand works.
Then the psychologists that were hired to understand the public behavior then come into play...
After 5 years, the public becomes DESENSITIZED to the new $50 fee. And then they slowly start opening all the other campgrounds again... and charge everybody $50.
So you see, in the end, nothing has changed but using supply and demand to manipulate public perception, acceptance, and commercialize what was once free.
This is corporatization at work. It is a cancer of democracy, the commons and freedom.
All free dispersed camping is being shut down on every forest across the United States. They are taking away all the alternatives and they are shutting down a percentage of the other campgrounds because the economics of supply and demand require that they first establish control to make the above model work.
Here in Washington State, the US Forest Service has been shutting down campground and dispsersed camping areas that used to be along all of our US Forest Service roads. They have blocked the secondary spur roads and put up no camping signs everywhere. The purpose is clear, they are forcing us to use the campground and pay the fees. They are forcing the public to use fee structures.
When I compained about this, they used the environmental argument that the dispersed areas had to be shut down to reveg the areas and to stop silt from running into the streams and save our salmon.
And the average camper of course would accept this explaination because they do not know that they are being lied too.
But I am not an average camper but an an ecologist with a degree from the Department of Forestry at Washington State University.
They are using false environmental reasoning to justify the implementing of fee for access. As I tried to tell folks back in the 1980's (everyone accused me of being a conspiracy theorist) they are BUILDING A MANAGERIAL INFRASTRUCTURE AROUND THE PEOPLES RECREATION. It is being done for profits and transfer of public ownership to corporations - NOT environmental reasons. Though they use our own environmental issues and sentimenality against us.
And here is the proof of that fact:
1) The manashtash drainage, which I complained about, essentially has no salmon. The Yakima River does have a salmon run but nearly all of the salmon are raised at hacheries on the Yakima River itself. And all of the salmon return to those hatcheries.
2) there has been no siltation problem and the trout are reproducing in the stream unhindered by any such falsely claimed 'siltation' issues. I have monitored the streams, they are completely healthy.
3) The land area represented by ALL the despersed camping areas in the Manashtash drainage of the Wenatchee National Forest (that they claim are causing siltation problems) represents less than one tenth of one percent of the clear cut logging that the US Forest Service actual promotes on that same forest and along that same stream!
I used to work for the US Forest Service. I used to work for Heather Murphy who was a biologist on the forest. I used to call spotted owls on the Wenatchee National Forest. And here is how it works folks:
1) the public demands that old growth forest be saved for the owls.
2) a mandate is given, the forest service must preserve X number of acres in old growth status.
3) without notifying the public, the US Forest Service changes their internal definition of old growth to read any forest with trees over 24 inches in diamenter (the proper definition is any tree over 48 inches in diameter).
5) X number of acres of previously logged lands (that were logged 40 years ago) are set aside as old growth under the hidden internal definition of old growth used by the US Forest Service. These trees were essential hand planted douglas fir that have, over the last 40 years, grown to 24-28 inches in diameter - in is seral stage, second growth forest. Not old growth.
6) The US Forest Service uses that second growth forest to satisfy the mandate with X number of acres.
6) The US Forest Service then goes into to the true old growth forest of Engleman spruce and red cedar with trees that are up to 8 FEET in diameter - and they clear cut that forest !
And they claim they preserved the mandated acreage on the forest when in fact it was all a lie based on an internal and nefarious change in how they define "old growth".
I left the Forest Service years ago because of this crap. And you know, the last 16 years I have worked in the corporate world as a senior computer consultant to Fortune 100 companies. And you people need to understand something. Laws do absolutely nothing.
You are wasting your time. Laws were meant to be broken. There will always be lobbists and their will always be loop holes. And there will always be dirty tricks like the changing of the definition of old growth. The only way you will preserve creation is to remove unethical and corrupt people from government.
There can be no compromise.
And with the issues we are facing today, you must become soldiers and be willing to give your life for our sustaining environment and our freedoms. And until you are willing to put your life on the line, you will continue to lose all that you have and define a hell for your childern.
You will be responsible for it.
Corruption in government is nothing new. Governments have gone the way of corruption since our ancestors first walked out of their caves and established social systems.
The question is, do you have the balls and the guts to stand up like our forerathers did to create and preserve the freedoms and morality of this once great nation?
Our government has been corrupted by the corporate elite. That is the problem. And if you cannot address that, realize that all other efforts are just wasted energy.