THREE FREE WEEKENDS IS GREAT; NOW TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Salazar, Permanently Waive National Park Entrance Fees
The Interior Department admits that ever-increasing fees discourage Americans from enjoying their national parks and hurt local economies. Hopefully, this leads to making our national parks a free tradition, every weekend.By Bill Schneider, 6-03-09
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Yesterday, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced he was waiving national park entrance fees for three prime summer weekends (June 20-21, July 18-19 and August 15-16), a widely reported and welcomed pronouncement.
But I’m more interested in the back story.
To me, even though Salazar didn’t say a word about it, his action seems to forecast a new philosophy coming out of the National Park Service (NPS), starting with this admission that ever-increasing fees are partly responsible for steadily declining park visitation. And ending, hopefully, with something I trumpeted two years ago in this column, making our national parks a free tradition.
Last year, notably, when Ken Salazar was still the senior senator from Colorado, he signed on as a co-sponsor of the Baucus-Crapo bill, which would’ve repealed the Federal Lands Recreational Enhancement Act (or the RAT, for Recreation Access Tax, to its critics), eliminated most fees imposed on access to national forests, and rolled back many national park fees that have soared up to $25 in most major parks.
The bill died a silent death at the end of the 110th Congress, but in April, Senators Max Baucus (D-MT) and Mike Crapo (R-ID) reintroduced it into the 111th Congress.
In announcing the free weekends, Salazar noted that last year our national parks had more than 275 million recreation visits, directly and indirectly pumping $10.6 billion into local economies and supporting more than 213,000 jobs, not counting NPS jobs.
“National Parks also serve as powerful economic engines for local communities and we hope that promoting visitation will give a small shot in the arm to businesses,” he added. “During these tough economic times, our national parks provide opportunities for affordable vacations for families. I encourage everyone to visit one of our nation’s crown jewels this summer and especially to take advantage of the three free-admission weekends.”
Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Salazar, told Associated Press that giving up entrance fees for the three weekends on the 147 national parks charging them would mean about $500,000 in lost revenue for the NPS. But she said increase in park-related tourism income for gift shops, outfitters, restaurants, hotels, and other local businesses would more than make up for the loss.
Take a moment to digest that statement. If this is true, and I have no doubt that it is, for these three free weekends, then it would be even more true for the entire year, right? So what’s stopping us from coming out even further ahead, economically, by permanently waiving park entrance fees?
The NPS can then forego the high administrative costs and use personnel now managing the toll booths for more critical tasks such as interpretation, enforcement and maintenance of the failing infrastructure we see everywhere in our national parks.
All park fees (entrance fees, plus camping, backcountry permits, outfitter fees, et al) cover roughly 6 percent of the NPS budget. Entrance fees only probably cover 4 or 5 percent, or less. Then, deduct the high cost of collecting, administrating and accounting for millions of small transactions, and you’re really not left with much, nor are you giving up much on the scale the federal government works on.
That seems simple enough. Abandoning entrance fees has lots of economic upside and minimal downside.
Even though the economic benefits of eliminating fees is obvious and noteworthy, the non-economic benefits may be even more significant. Far more momentous, perhaps, is doing all we can to reverse the disastrous trend of Americans, especially our youth, losing their connection with nature. (More on this next week.)
Most Americans, even most of the population living in urban areas, live within an easy day’s drive of a national park. To many, right or wrong, national parks are synonymous with the “outdoors” and “wild nature.”
It’s well documented that participation in most outdoor activities is declining along with park visitation, as are sales of outdoor equipment (except guns and ammo, of course). Discouraging people, particularly children, from enjoying their national parks and other public lands with access fees is definitely one reason, and probably a bigger factor than agencies want to admit. Since Salazar now concedes that entrance fees reduce national park visitation, he is positioned to really make a difference by taking the next step and waiving entrance fees permanently. You’ve sent up your trail balloon, Secretary Salazar, and it worked, so go for it.
Footnote: For chonology of my coverage of the recreation fee issue, click here.
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Comments
This is a watershed event: official recognition at last that fees deter visitation.
DUH.
Prior administrations (Clinton and Bush) subscribed to the "let them eat cake" philosophy of National Parks. It goes like this: if you can afford to travel to a Park you are rich enough that the entrance fee will mean nothing to you. Low income? Well, you can't afford the gas to get there, why should we cater to you?
But guess what? A whole lot of us are now a lot lower income than we used to be, and it's showing in our travel habits. Yes, $5 DOES make a difference, not to mention $25!
I agree it would be grand if Parks were all free all the time, but up until now there has been little political support for that. Maybe this will change under Salazar and Obama.
Meanwhile the very least we can do to boost the economy and get kids outdoors is to eliminate the stupid parking fees at trailheads on National Forests and BLM, and the fees for scenic roads and overlooks.
Mr Baucus, please get your Fee Repeal bill moving!
That being said, why should folks who cannot afford to go to a NP have to pay for those of us who can use them? Is the idea if they have to pay for someone else to go, they may as well go too and increase visitation?
What about doubling the fees at the overused parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon to pay for the lesser visited parks. Those are discussed as limiting visitors from time to time becasue of the overuse.
While people and politicians certainly favor blanket solutions, reality is rarely that simple.
Again, I'm not arguing the point; rather, I'm just hoping someone can point me to the documentation that shows such a universal correlation.
rscott
With your brief mention of concern of our youth and their lack of connection to the outdoors, check out a gentleman named Richard Louv. You can google him or Last Child in the Woods, one of his books. I've heard him speak at an Urban Land Institute conference on what he has termed "nature deficit disorder" and he has testified several times before congress on the subject.
One of his basic premises is if we are raising a generation that has lost touch with nature, how can we expect them to be good stewards of it when they are adults? I think you will find his work very interesting.
Those that are so poorly visited that they need to eliminate fees to lure visitors should probably be taken out of the park system.
The NPS has an annual budget of right around $3B, $10/head.
Clearly, user fees are discriminatory; there is no sliding scale based on income. And arguing that fees are needed to fund Park maintenance is no excuse -- we've got loads of fees today, and deteriorating infrastructure and services. So obviously fees can't float our parks and public lands. Either way, the funding has to come through Congressional appropriations. And the bigger segment of the public that has access to the parks, the more political pressure there will be to hold Senators and Representatives accountable to providing sufficient funding for our public lands.
The "Fee Demo" program was never about providing a sustainable funding base for our public lands. It was about reducing the number of people who can enjoy them, and thereby undermine the powerful base of support for conserving public lands. If public lands can then be cast as a benefit that can be enjoyed only by the elitist rich, then conservation support for protecting them wanes, and it becomes easy for the vultures in the extractive industries to swoop in and claim them for their own profit-driven uses.
The source I gave shows $180M-something of that total budget coming from recreational fees.
Yellowstone has over a million visitors, so does Grand Canyon and Yosemite, they alone must account for the 180 million. It is time to get rid of the non paying parks, turn them into state parks that do not need the fancy visitor centers etc and can be run much more efficiently.
I know Yellowstone does not charge for back country camping, of which there are 300 sites, at $10/nite that would be $3000/day, that would at least pay for cleaning and maintaining the sites.
Of course all of those ideas are absurd, and so is the concept that public lands should have to pay their own way in user fees. Public lands are a public good that benefits all Americans in a wide variety of ways, even those who never set foot on them. They are deserving of support with tax revenues. Period.
Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see everything free. But the reality is that it costs more money to run National Parks than most other federal lands. They are typically underfunded as it is. These token fees (and, yes, in todays economy twenty five bucks for seven days for the whole family is "token") help to offset them.
I also think that crime would increase in parks. Think about it. Most crooks don't want to pay a fee to go rob someone, when they can rob someone without paying a fee (or having their license number recorded at the fee station).
The real reason visitation is down is because more and more young people are losing interest in the outdoors. Statistics show that their are fewer people interested in all outdoor activities including hunting, fishing, hiking and camping. I live next to Yellowstone, and whenever we have company it is the older visitors who can't wait to visit the park. For the younger ones it's like, "Look! There's a moose!!" "MMMmm!" they say, and their heads go right back into their video games. They are totally bored. They can't wait to get home so that they can watch TV or get on the computer. Too bad.
The government conspiracy theorists always give the NPS and USFS too much credit: the original Fee Demo program wasn't created as a secret agenda to keep visitors out, it was created by certain congressmen and Clinton administration functionaries to transfer budget costs directly to citizens (on top of taxes) and, the theory went, to help increase revenue at the popular parks without increasing the budget significantly for the NPS overall. (Part of the Fee Demo mandate was that no permanent NPS employees could be hired with the money & severe restrictions on hiring seasonal employees with the money, as well.)
But the Fee Demo never did the trick and, in fact, in places like Yellowstone it WAS the trick. Visitors --and congressmen-- were lead to believe that a $200,000 increase in the trails budget would result in $200,000 worth of trails improvements, and actually, $170,000 was transferred out of the "hard" trails budget into other maintenance departments for a net gain of $30,000 in trails improvements. (These numbers are not exact, but the rough percentages would be similar.)
So we can see that government budgeting is not as straightforward as Schneider would like his readers to believe. Other commentators on this thread have pointed out that Schneider presents no actual evidence of the "gains" created by the elimination of fees, nor does he ask Congress for budget increases. Schneider also seems to believe that there is no need to have employees at entrance stations to answer questions and hand out information. He also rather blithely suggests that the money will simply flow from one NPS division to another--in tact, no less.
Make no mistake, I'm no fan of fees on public lands and it made my skin crawl to hear the likes of former Superintendent of Yellowstone Mike Finlay compare Yellowstone's entrance fee to the admission cost of the Lagoon theme park in Utah. If fees are eliminated, it may very well increase visitation but in the short term, the parks will have less operating revenue and in the long term have even tougher budget concerns than they do now.
Another solution, might be to increase fishing license fees and similar specific use fees, reduce entrance fees over time, and truly study and quantify (and qualify) the free market approach advocated by Schneider.
While I respect the argument that we in the West deserve the right to complete freedom to "our lands", there are a couple of qualifying arguments or questions that need to be taken into consideration. First of all, your attitude that the Fed is the daddy Warbucks of the West feeds into our tendency to look at what our country can do for us without recognizing that we need to be giving back something to keep our natural resources sustainable.
Second, even if all national park fees total 6% or less of the annual NPS budget, there isn't an Interior department bureaucracy that is funded to the extent that it can afford to give up what monies it does generate. By your own numbers, if the NPS has to account for "millions of small transactions", that is still a pocketful, ranging generally from $10-$25 per transaction.
Finally, there is the question that has been raised a number of times by research psychologists. Do humans value and treat with respect those experiences and things they get for free, or those they have to pay for? In the realm of Community Based Social Marketing, where reknowned environmental psychologists like Doug McKenzie-Mohr have worked, the answer has resoundingly been for the latter, with the result being that in a world that is desperately in need of preservation of open space, national treasures and our most vital natural resource--the public lands--we've all got to pitch in.
I agree that Congress must step up and replace any lost fee income--at least! I'd prefer even more tax money go to the national parks and I'd consider it money well spent compared to many other things the federal government spends money on.
Bill
If the goal of the fee-charging policy was to limit visitation to overused parks, I'd have a different view of it, but this is not the goal, spoken or unspoken. It's strictly to raise money that Congress refuses to give the NPS.
Bill
An annual parking/visiting fee of $25-$50 or $5-$10 per visit does not break anyone's bank if that's the only fee they have to dish out to visit a park; of course food has to be bought whether you have a BBQ at home or bring it to the park, no argument here for free park fees. If people don't have the money to pay an entrance fee, then they won't have the money for gas to get there to begin with.
I'd much rather keep paying an annual fee and know that I can use a decently clean restroom, or can walk along the trails without tripping, etc., than going to the park for free but have to deal with dirty restrooms and trash all over. Even though we're paying for park entrance now, there are many visitors who DO NOT respect nature and keep their areas clean! How will it be when everything is free?? I don't even want to think about that.
Bill, please look at the reality before changing things for the worse!!
Actually it would be jsut as easy to make the case that they don't go because of the increasing roadless areas, the real fact is people do what pleases them.
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