an interesting read, very long

[Ida_Mann]

I'm doing research for a speech and saw this.

Id@


Copyright 2007 The Denver Post
All Rights Reserved
The Denver Post

June 10, 2007 Sunday
FINAL EDITION

SECTION: PERSPECTIVE; Pg. E-06

LENGTH: 709 words

HEADLINE: Public-lands shakedown

BYLINE: Ted Williams Writers on the Range, Vermont

BODY:


Scarcely anyone objected in 1996 when Congress authorized the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to charge the public new or increased fees for accessing its own land to fish, hunt, boat, drive, park, camp or walk. After all, it was going to be an experiment - a three-year pilot program called fee demonstration.

But when it comes to federal revenue, intermittent streams have a way of becoming perennial. Fee demo was extended in 2001, and again in 2004, when it was expanded into the Recreation Enhancement Act. Often called the Recreation Access Tax, or RAT, it enabled the agencies to charge even more. The system places federal land managers in the business of attracting crowds, and it may motivate them to ignore the needs of fish and wildlife.

The big beneficiary of these access fees has been the motorized recreation industry to which they've provided standing and representation. Sponsoring fee demo through a cost-share partnership with the Forest Service was the powerful American Recreation Coalition, whose membership is comprised mainly of manufacturers of all-terrain vehicles, motorized trail bikes, jet skis and recreation vehicles. And joining the coalition in lobbying aggressively for both fee demo and RAT have been the National Off Highway Vehicle Coalition, the National Snowmobile Manufacturers Association and consumers of all things motorized who band together as the Blue Ribbon Coalition.

With little public or congressional oversight, the Forest Service assesses recreational facilities for profitability. The ones that generate the least revenue - remote campgrounds and trailheads, places to which lovers of wildness and quiet would naturally gravitate - are now first to disappear.

As abusive as RAT fees are in their own right, the Forest Service is abusing them further by playing fast and loose with the law. The Recreation Enhancement Act requires that fees be charged only if there has been "significant investment," defined as six amenities: security services (meaning staffers who check to see if you've paid), parking, toilets, picnic tables, trash receptacles, and signs.

A site has to have all six. But the Forest Service has dreamed up a way of getting around the law by designating sections of forest as "high impact recreation areas" (HIRAs). One corner of a HIRA might have a sign; another, perhaps 2 miles away, a trash can. Three miles from both might be a parking lot; the law makes no reference to anything like an HIRA. The Forest Service flouts even this bizarre interpretation of the law. Last year it admitted to Congress that 739 HIRAs didn't have the six amenities.

When Christine Wallace, a Tucson legal secretary, refused to pay a fee on a Coronado National Forest HIRA in Arizona, she was prosecuted for what amounted to hiking without a license. While the law allows the Forest Service to charge all manner of fees, it specifically prohibits entrance fees. Accordingly, a court found that the agency had acted illegally.

But the Forest Service appealed and, in January, won a reversal. If the ruling is not struck down by Wallace's motion to reconsider or by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where it seems headed, case law will criminalize exiting your vehicle on your own public land without first finding a ranger station, if one is open, and coughing up money that even the motorized-recreation axis that hatched RAT fees never intended for you to pay.

RAT fees are more than just a ripoff. They've become a replacement for squandered wealth, an incentive for continued profligacy, and an excuse for the White House to keep slashing appropriations for public-lands management. Summing up the whole sorry mess is district ranger Cid Morgan of the Angeles National Forest in California: "We're going to have to do more with less until we do everything with nothing."

If Morgan and other forest advocates hope for relief from the Forest Service's new director, Abigail Kimbell, who took office in February, they shouldn't. Kimbell says she wants to increase fees.

Ted Williams of Vermont is conservation editor of FlyRod&Reel magazine and a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia (hcn.org).

LOAD-DATE: June 12, 2007

[Stewards]

Thanks for the info ida man. That has been on the discussion table for quite a while. Here are two inserts that might also be of interest.

Americans were used to paying entrance fees at national parks and wildlife refuges. But after Fee Demo was extended through 2001 they expressed outrage about what they came to call the Recreation Access Tax (RAT) on national forests and BLM land. Late in 2004 RAT was extended yet again — this time for 10 years — when Fee Demo was replaced with the Recreation Enhancement Act, a law that empowers the four agencies to charge even more access fees.


Fee Demonstration and the Recreation Enhancement Act were written by and for the motorized-recreation industry. There was no Congressional or public involvement. Both RAT laws were slipped through as midnight riders tacked to appropriation bills because the industry knew they couldn’t survive open debate.

The other interseting point in this article is this:

Scott Silver, director of the Bend, Oregon-based Wild Wilderness — one of the very few environmental groups that has sounded the alarm — lives two blocks from the Deschutes River, world famous for its steelhead. “At the end of town the Deschutes National Forest begins,” he says. “Upriver for maybe five miles is what the Forest Service now calls a High Impact Recreation Area, and I cannot go anywhere there in a car without having paid. An access road runs parallel to the river, and there are about three perpendicular roads to it. You may be a mile away, but as soon as you enter one of those perpendicular roads you’re confronted by a sign that says ‘Entering Fee Area.’ I use a kayak. You’re not going to carry a kayak a mile.”

Will Fee Area's happen in all the National Forests

[lisa]

  Gee and everyone wonders why I have been against these fees.....