Fees extended on public land

WASHINGTON – Recreation fees charged to people who picnic, hike or canoe in national forests and other public lands will stay in place for at least 10 more years under a giant spending bill approved by Congress.

The fees were first imposed in 1996 on a temporary basis and have been renewed every two years since. Lawmakers have resisted efforts to make them permanent, citing their widespread unpopularity, particularly in the West.

Federal land managers say charging $5 for use of marked trails and restrooms – or $10 for a campsite – ensures that those who use the land help pay to maintain it. The fees generate about $170 million a year for the Forest Service and Department of the Interior, which use the money to maintain restrooms, collect trash and provide other amenities.

But critics call the fees a hidden tax that discourages the public from using public lands.

The fee “amounts to nothing more that a stealth double tax for hikers, hunters, picnickers or anyone wishing to spend a day at the beach or in the forest with their family,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore.

He and other critics were outraged that the measure extending the fees for at least 10 years was inserted into the $388 billion spending bill at the last minute by Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, an Appropriations subcommittee chairman who has no public lands in his district.

“This was a victory of pork over principle,” said Robert Funkhouser, president of the Colorado-based Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, which has worked to oppose the fee demonstration program. “Ralph Regula is responsible for the first tax increase of the Bush administration.”

A spokesman for Regula could not be reached for comment.

But Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett called the new law “a very important accomplishment by the Congress.”

The National Park Service and other agencies have long had the ability to charge fees, Scarlett said, but now can keep much of the money on site, so it can be used for maintenance and improvements where it is collected.

“Our No. 1 reason (for the fees) is to provide enhanced services and facilities to the public,” she said.

Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif, chairman of the House Resources Committee, said the bill should put an end to fears that fees will be misused, because Congress has laid out circumstances under which they can be collected. Only developed sites, with some type of restroom or picnic area, will be allowed to charge fees.

The Forest Service recently stopped collecting fees at 400 sites after the public complained the sites had no amenities.

Even with the safeguards, some activists call the fees fundamentally unfair. Scott Silver, executive director of Oregon-based Wild Wilderness, said there is virtually no federal land near his central Oregon home that does not charge a fee.

Those who argue that a $5 hike costs less than a movie or book miss the point, Silver said.

“A movie is a private good that comes from a company that produces it,” he said. “The forest is our birthright. To equate the two is a false equation.”