Fees are collected at many developed sites, such as the wildlife viewing area, above. Photo courtesy U.S. Forest Service
The colorful collection of canyons, bluffs and plains in the Red Rock area of the Coconino National Forest attracts more visitors than most national forests: hikers, equestrians, campers, motorists, mountain bikers, artists and archeological dig enthusiasts flood the forest each year. The area is one of the most fragile and diverse pieces of real estate in the national forest system.
A rotating core of three volunteer rangers helps patrol the forest. They interpret the prehistoric and natural sites for visitors and also act as site watchdogs, ensuring that no one damages the ancient art and vulnerable ecology. Arizona’s climate attracts attendees twelve months a year, so no ranger works during a slow season.
“To have them in the field, boots on the ground, is important to people,” says Red Rock district ranger Heather Provencio.
In return for their efforts, the volunteer rangers receive experience as wilderness specialists, housing and a twenty-dollar per day stipend. The Coconino can provide these volunteer rangers because visitors pay for a pass to use the Red Rock area. The pass costs five dollars a day, with discounts for repeat visitors, and allows access to facilities across 160 acres. The fees raise about $800,000 annually, 95 percent of which stays on site for the ranger program and related efforts. The U.S. Forest Service uses the recreational fees to help maintain 177 miles of hiking trails in the district, which receives more than 4 million visitors a year, and to fund interpreters at archeological sites on the forest.
“Otherwise, they’d be closed to the public,” Provencio says. “I just shudder to think what the impact would be if we didn’t have the Red Rock Pass.”
The Coconino National Forest is able to charge the fee and keep the bulk of the money on site under the Recreation Fee Program, authorized by Congress in the 2004 Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act. The law replaced the Recreational Fee Demonstration Program enacted in 1996.
National forests across the country have been using money collected under the current recreational fee program—and before that, the fee demo program—to maintain and improve their campgrounds, visitor centers and other amenities. For many forests, like the Coconino, the funds are an essential part of the operating budget. But since its inception, the fee collection program has generated a heated debate over its philosophy, along with charges of fee mismanagement and frustration over collection methods, jurisdiction and management.
CHECKERED PAST, CONFUSING PRESENT
Unlike the National Park Service, the Forest Service is prohibited by law from charging entrance fees; it gets around this by charging recreation fees. The 2004 law allows the fees only at areas that provide all the following amenities: developed parking; permanent toilet facilities; trash receptacles; interpretive signs, exhibits or kiosks; picnic tables; and security services.
When the 2004 law was enacted, the agency stopped charging recreation fees at 437 sites that didn’t provide the required amenities. In other places, it added picnic tables or trash cans, and collected fees for campers, boaters and other users.
But amenities are hardly the only problem.
The Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act required the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to set up state or regional recreational resource advisory committees, which must approve all new fees and fee increases. It took longer than Congress anticipated to establish the committees; in 2006, the Government Accountability Office surveyed fee sites and released a report that cited significant noncompliance with the 2004 law.
“Many agency officials said that while the agencies have issued some interim guidance, [the Recreation Enhancement Act] was difficult to interpret and suggested the need for more specific and detailed guidance on the fee program,” the report stated, adding that “some units did not have an effective means of verifying whether all collected fees are accounted for.”
The federal report stated that “no state or regional [resource advisory committees] are fully operational,” although Congress assumed that by then they would be. Thirty-eight percent of the respondents to a federal questionnaire said they couldn’t adjust or start fees because the advisory committees weren’t in place.
Employees at thirty-six sites reported they were charging fees even though they weren’t providing all the required amenities. Forest Service headquarters responded by saying the respondents misunderstood the questions. At the time, 410 ranger districts in 155 national forests were collecting fees.
In some cases, following the law conflicted with sound wildlife management practices. The law requires trash cans, but in several northern national forests, the Forest Service told visitors not to leave garbage because it attracts grizzly bears.
COLLECTION AND ALLOCATION HEADACHES
In 2001, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) recommended the Forest Service provide guidance to its managers on the best procedures to use for collecting fees, ranging from using credit cards and automated collection machines to selling passes through off-site vendors or by toll-free numbers.
But nine years later, the Forest Service hasn’t issued final regulations and guidance on the fee collection program. The 2006 Government Accountability Office report stated that agency workers were confused by the interim guidance they got regarding collecting fees, complying with public participation requirements in setting fees and knowing what to do with the collected money to make sure spending enhanced visitor experience, as the law requires.
The 2004 law also created confusion about how the agencies were supposed to collect the fees. The 2006 survey found that only one-third of the fee-collecting sites received audits. Nor had the Forest Service figured out the best ways to collect fees. At the unaudited Tonto National Forest Mesa Ranger District near Phoenix, for instance, staff collected fees manually when the automated machines broke. Employees could collect hundreds of dollars on a busy day, but management hadn’t figured out a way to protect them from robbery or to account for the cash.
Since then, the Forest Service has updated its billing and collections procedures, but the Government Accountability Office says it hasn’t evaluated their effectiveness. A statement provided by the Forest Service press office says the agency is “in the process of procuring a new ‘point-of-sale’ system, which will allow us to accept credit cards in more locations, as well as process electronic check payments” and is expanding its capacity to sell passes online.
In some cases, selling joint passes with other public land agencies worked. Seventeen national forests in Oregon and Washington participated in the Northwest Forest Pass, for instance, which reduced agency costs and improved visitor convenience.
Minus the administrative costs, the forest that sells the multi-site pass keeps the money, since most people recreate locally. The Forest Service does not keep track of how many users buy a pass at one site and use it elsewhere. When people buy at off-site vendors, such as sporting goods stores, the money goes to the nearest national forest. Very few people buy online; when they do, each national forest in the region gets a share.
But a combined pass doesn’t always work. The Forest Service, BLM, National Park Service and Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation jointly offered the Visit Idaho Playgrounds Pass a few years ago, which allowed use of more than 100 state and federal outdoor sites in Idaho for one fee. The agencies surveyed users to see who spent how much time where to divide funds among participating sites.
“It was a program we were all very, very proud of because it was unique across the jurisdictional boundaries for land management,” says Jennifer Wernex, communications manager for the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation. “Our customers loved it. No one can come up to a site and easily determine whether it’s a state park or federal trailhead. They just want access to the land.”
The program proved costly to manage. Each year the group had to decide how to allocate funds, and there was never enough money to advertise the program properly to the public. And after four years, the effort fizzled because of lack of participation. Only 150 to 200 residents a year bought a pass, and the agencies ended the program.
The current federal law, which lasts through 2014, requires the Forest Service to use at least 80 percent of the fees at the site where they were collected, although if some places are over-funded, the agency can reduce that amount to 60 percent.
In the 2006 report, the Government Accountability Office also faulted the Forest Service for failing to keep a list of its priority needs or to measure the impact of fees collected on reducing its deferred maintenance backlog. Nor did it calculate how much it was spending on collecting fees.
PAYING TOO MUCH FOR TOO LITTLE?
In 2008, Mark Rey, then-undersecretary of agriculture, told Congress that “one-third of visitation sites would be in jeopardy” and thousands would have to close if the Forest Service had to stop charging fees. Day use charges average $5.75, “less than going to a Washington state park, substantially less than taking your family to a movie,” he reminded a House subcommittee. The fees comprise about 13 percent of the Forest Service’s recreation budget.
But critics question whether patrons are getting the amenities they pay for. “The thing that gets me is…they’re charging for everything whether it meets the improved criteria or not. You go to the trailhead, and they want five dollars from you no matter what it is,” complains Idaho State Representative George Eskridge, a Republican. “The Forest Service and BLM are going beyond their authority and charging fees when the facilities aren’t there.”
Eskridge says the fees are justified where there are improved campgrounds, but not for “old torn-down bathrooms and gravel walkways.” Eskridge complains that before the fee demo program was authorized, sites charged reasonable fees, but when they got to keep most of the money rather than sending it to the Treasury, fees started a steady upward trend.
Scott Silver, executive director of Wild Wilderness, says that in some places the Forest Service will let you drive through the forest for free, but if you park your car to take a hike, you have to pay or get a ticket. “It doesn’t cost but $100 to put up a picnic table and another $100 to put a sign on a piece of wood, and that creates a legal site,” Silver says. “They say ‘we’re not charging for parking; we’re charging for the six amenities.’”
On the other hand, fees may not be as high as the Forest Service would like because some of the advisory committees that have to approve them are still not fully functional. The law requires eleven-member committees, with representatives of specified user groups, including summer and winter motorized and non-motorized recreation, hunting and fishing, related businesses, environmental groups and governments.
“It did take a long time to get off the ground,” says Drew Vankat, who serves on the Colorado advisory committee. “We’ve had a few meetings, [and] we’re looking to fill one or two positions. You have to have a certain quorum, and I don’t think we have that. It’s been off and on, and it’s off right now. Maybe next year.” The summer 2009 meeting was canceled.
Critics contend the whole resource advisory committee system is a sham designed to give the Forest Service a rubber stamp. “They just approve everything,” says Kitty Benzar, president of the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, which issued a 2008 report that accused the Forest Service of “intentionally suppressing public involvement in the implementation of access fees on public land.”
Benzar counted 803 fee increases, 305 new fees approved and only twenty-seven denied requests and six withdrawn in the history of advisory committees that cover the Forest Service and BLM. “Obviously the system is working as the Forest Service intended, but not for the general public’s benefit,” Benzar says.
According to data on its website, the Pacific Northwest Resource Advisory Committee has approved 235 Forest Service fee requests and rejected none. It deferred five requests, and one was withdrawn.
The Forest Service and BLM choose committee members, “and they’re chosen because they’re likely to say yes. They haven’t been chosen because they are likely to stand up,” Benzar says.
And while the committees are required to meet in public and take citizen input, they don’t necessarily pay attention. In 2008, Peter Wiechers, a California teacher and kayaker, expressed his frustration during congressional hearings, saying “my efforts to be informed about, and provide input into, Forest Service decisions that directly affect my recreational use of the Sequoia National Forest have been thwarted at every turn. I have been lied to, misled, vilified in public, marginalized and ignored.”
Wiechers objected to a proposed kayaking fee increase at Forks of the Kern River, claiming that the Forest Service had failed to account for the money it had already collected. A regular user of that segment of the river, Wiechers said he hadn’t seen evidence that the money was being used to improve the area. “I went to their [committee] meetings with hard questions, and they didn’t seem very happy about it,” he says.
Wiechers tried to shake up the group by joining it. He applied for a vacant seat on the committee a year ago. “I got my application in on time and never heard anything back from them,” he says, adding that the committee extended the application deadline several times, and then canceled its scheduled September meeting for lack of a quorum.
Marlene Finley, the designated federal officer for the California Resource Advisory Committee, did not respond to telephone requests for comment.
Montana Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would kill the fee program in both the last Congress and the current one. But Baucus failed to garner support for the bill. He picked up only two cosponsors: Montana Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, and Idaho Senator Mike Crapo, a Republican. The bill went to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where it has lain as undisturbed as a rock in the most remote section of a national forest.
Arizona Representative Raśl Grijalva chairs the House Subcommitee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands. He said in 2008 that “I firmly believe that the American public should not have to pay additional fees to have access to our world-class system of parks, forests, refuges and public lands—whether it be listening to a ranger program in a national park, hiking the wilderness, or enjoying a picnic in the woods in a national forest.” But neither Grijalva nor anyone else in the House has taken action to amend, let alone end, the program.