Reappraisal To Boost Cost Of Cabin Sites Federal Assessment Of National Forest Land Could Mean Fees 20 Times Higher For Retreats

Owners of prime cabin sites in the national forests will be forced to pay drastically higher rents as the government reappraises the land for the first time in two decades.

In many cases, oceanside or lakefront sites will cost five to 20 times more than they do now, the Forest Service says. In Idaho, for example, the annual fee on one five-cabin, lakeside compound in the Sawtooth National Forest will soar from $4,000 to $67,000.

Because of the out-of-date appraisals, the fees have lagged far behind rising land values despite annual fee increases, the General Accounting Office said in a 1996 report. There are 15,600 such permits nationwide, and all will be reappraised during the next five years.

“We’re trying to do what the GAO said: ‘Folks, you’ve got to charge fair market value,”’ Forest Service spokesman Chris Holmes said Thursday.

One cabin owner bracing for a fee increase is Bob Ervin of Gladstone, Ore., who has a two-bedroom cabin along the Metolius River in Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest. The Forest Service last appraised the site in the 1970s for $16,000. Over the last two decades, his fee has risen from $800 to $1,200.

“We agree with the fact that those of us who have permits to use the federal lands should in fact pay a fair and equitable permit fee to the Forest Service,” said Ervin, executive director of the National Forest Homeowners, an organization of permit holders.

“In our area, recreation property (values) tended to rise rapidly,” he said.

The Sawtooth was the first with new appraisals. The Black Hills forest in South Dakota and Wyoming’s Shoshone forest are next. Forests with the oldest valuations are being done first.

Appraisals will be released for 156 Black Hills sites in the next two weeks. “Most of them by and large are down by the stream bottoms, pretty neat country,” said Gene Singsaas, an official with the forest.

As in the Black Hills, many of the cabins date back to the 1920s, when the government first started offering the sites as a way to stimulate interest in the national forests.

The sites remain government property, and the cabin owners pay an annual fee for their use. The Forest Service stopped offering the sites in the 1960s, but owners still can sell their permits to someone else. The sites were last appraised between 1978 and 1983.

The fee is set at 5 percent of the land’s appraised value and then increased each year according to the Consumer Price Index, an estimate of the cost of living. Those increases haven’t kept pace with the rise in land values, GAO said.

“Land values have been escalating far greater than was ever expected,” Holmes said.

Revenue from the Sawtooth’s 182 leases is expected to jump from under $100,000 a year to $800,000.

Those cabins could turn out to be a bargain before the Forest Service gets around to appraising them again, however. By agreement with the cabin owners association, the Forest Service won’t do new appraisals for another 20 years, Holmes said.

So there’s nothing but the inflation-based formula to provide for annual fee increases, he said.

Fees for commercial operations, such as marinas, also are being reevaluated. GAO said they are based on a system that hasn’t been updated in nearly 30 years.

Commercial operators in national forests usually are charged less than 3 percent of their gross sales, while fees on state-held land are typically 5 percent to 15 percent of gross sales, according to the GAO.

In Colorado, for example, marina operators pay fees of 7 percent on state land and 2.8 percent in national forests.