PARANOIA UNFOUNDED?

FS Plans No New Recreation Access Fees in Northern Rockies

By Bill Schneider, 5-13-06

Last week, I posted an article on the Recreation Enhancement Act using, regrettably, outdated information. In the process of retracting that article, I decided it would be interesting to know what really was happening within the Forest Service on recreation access fees.

I caught up with Joni Packard, a recreation specialist in the northern region office in Missoula who works on this program. She explained that even though the Recreation Enhancement Act passed eighteen months ago (December 8, 2004), we shouldn’t expect too much to change .

“We are probably going to stay close to what we have now in the northern region (primarily Montana and northern Idaho),” she assured me. “We have no plans for new fees right now.”

There is a pent up fear among national forest users in Idaho, Montana and other states that the other FS regions will follow the lead of the Pacific Northwest Region, where hikers, hunters, and other forest users must pay a fee to park at all or most trailheads and suffer sizeable fines if they don’t leave their deposit in that reinforced steel payment box.

This fee program has been contentious and hundreds of outdoor groups have lobbied Congress to repeal what they call the RAT (Recreation Access Tax). They claim they already pay for access to the national forests every year on April 15. Actually, in Montana, they also pay every time they go to the gas pump because the Big Sky State devotes a small portion of the gas tax to development of trails and recreational access.

Packard explained that any new fee must fit the criteria of the legislation. “We can’t charge for general access or solely for parking.”

“We aren’t planning to have trailhead parking fees, but we might have some fees on trailheads where we have a lot of amenities, but we don’t have any trailhead sites planned right now,” she explains. “There is opportunity to do that, and if there is a lot use occurring, this is a way to mitigate the impacts.”

She said there could be a few new campground fees and cabin rental sites where fees are charged. The FS will continue to charge for highly developed sites like visitor centers like Quake Lake (south of Ennis) or Lewis & Clark (Great Falls), but the REA has not changed that. Those fees, as with most campground fees, have been authorized long ago with other legislation, but REA allows the local ranger district to keep most of the revenue.

A common criticism of the REA is that the money it raises doesn’t really end up going to the intended uses, but Packard assures that the money stays in the local ranger district to be used for recreation development. Also, she has not seen corrsponding reduction in recreation budgets. “It was not intended to be an offset,” she notes, “but there has been a general decline in federal budgets because money is going to hurricane relief and war efforts in Iraq.”

If interested, here is a link to the Recreation Access Act, which authorized the Forest Service to charge fees for ten years, until December 2014.

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