Anti-Fee Editorials

IDAHO MOUNTAIN EXPRESS Editorial 8/11/99

American Recreation Coalition president Derrick Crandall says the fact that Sawtooth National Recreation Area users don't like the fees they're being forced to pay is the fault of local forest officials. He says the forest folks didn't communicate well.

In fact, the opposite is true.

Forest officials explained the forest was being loved to death and that fees are necessary because the federal government just can't afford to do the job. Recreation has to pay its way, they said.

Unlike timber and mining, of course.

After all, Congress and the Forest Service had to swear off the big money they had spent subsidizing roads, timber cuts and mines for nearly a century. They couldn't be expected to fork over to clear trails and install log bridges to make it easier for legions of Vibram soles to tromp around the landscape.

Forest officials outlined how fees would be collected and spent. They outlined how fee fugitives would be apprehended.

Yet users rejected fees and didn't pay them because they are unfair, unwarranted and poorly conceived. Payments increased only when the Forest Service began to play the heavy--issuing tickets with fines to people without passes.

Saturday is a national day of protest. Sign a petition or write a letter to a congressman or senator. Tell them how you feel about the fees. Tell them to quit believing their own PR and Crandall's silly excuses, and to start listening.

THE OREGONIAN, August 12, 1999 By Phillip Johnson

A new blight has appeared on the Oregon Coast in recent years. Just as you are about to shed the cares of civilization and roam onto a beach, you're confronted with a row of threatening signs.

"Day Use Permit Required," they read. "Violators Subject to Fine and/or Vehicle Towing at Owner's Expense."

The simple act of visiting the natural world has become a commercial transaction.

Signs like these are polluting trailheads and viewpoints all over America. They are the gift of an unholy trinity composed of Newt Gingrich's Congress, the commercial recreation industries and the "Wise Use" movement. The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program, which exacts a charge for admission to certain natural areas like Yaquina Head north of Newport, is the harbinger of a strategy to privatize our public lands, manage them for developed, motorized forms of recreation and turn the wilderness into theme parks and entertainment attractions.

Charging a fee for access to nature does violence to our relationship to the earth. But a special violation takes place on Oregon's coast when toll booths block our paths to the shore, as we have a generations-old tradition that the beaches belong to the people. Our Oregon Beach Law gives us the right to wander our shoreline at will.

Yet those who don't believe that anything has value unless it comes with a price sticker seek to turn the beaches we have reserved as a common inheritance into a profit center. They can't charge us to stroll our public shore, but they are making us pay to get there.

This Saturday, a nationwide Fee Protest Day is being sponsored by roughly 100 environmental and public recreation groups, including the Oregon Shores Conservation Coalition.

Among the dozens of national demonstrations are three in Oregon: at Yaquina Head just north of Newport, Cape Perpetua just south of Yachats and the Dunes Overlook, between Florence and Gardiner. All run from 10 a.m. until noon.

These protests give Oregonians a chance to underscore our commitment to public beaches, and beyond that, to a belief, both democratic and moral, that the common heritage of the natural world should be open to all.

The federal government shouldn't be the only focus, either. The Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation charges day- use fees at some state parks, which likewise violates the spirit of the Oregon Beach Law and undercuts our case against the federal government.

Two bills before Congress would end the program: HR 2295 by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., and HR 786, by Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif. Protesting the fees to your congressional representative, and supporting these bills, would be useful.

There are many good reasons to oppose fees for access to our public lands. They exclude and thus dispossess the poorest among us -- and once the program has taken root, we can expect escalating prices that will pose a barrier to many more of us. They require that hikers, birdwatchers and kayakers, who do no harm, subsidize the miners and ranchers who pay a pittance for the public resources they extract for profit. They will lead land managers to favor high-impact forms of recreation -- ski runs, groomed ORV trails, helicopter overflights and the like - - for which the highest, budget-boosting fees can be charged. They are the camel's nose under the tent for a coalition of interests whose goal is to hand public lands over to private entrepreneurs.

Underlying all this, for me, is a sense of claustrophobia.

The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program is the work of those who would put a price on everything, because they know the value of nothing. They seek to impose the marketplace as a prison, defiling our relationship to the wider web of life by forcing it into the commercial realm and transmogrifying the land itself into an "attraction" that exists only for sale.

Believing as I do that there are things that are sacred, things that are older, deeper and truer than the marketplace, I find that the fee program is an attempt to set up Mammon as the gatekeeper to the works of creation.

EDITORIAL - From the Editorial Board Twin Falls Idaho The Times News: Jan. 7, 2000

(((condensed)))

It's time for Smokey Bear to warm to some basic truths about the Recreation Fee Demonstration Project in the Sawtooth National Forest:

* American taxpayers buy the right to use national forest lands every April 15. Charging a separate fee is double taxation.

* The recreation fee is nothing more than a scheme to make money off of low-impact hikers, anglers and picnickers.

Most folks don't mind paying a fee when they use something that was expensive to build. Camping at a developed campsite and launching a boat at a boat ramp are activities for which most people will willingly pay.

But c'mon, is walking down a trail or picnicking along a lake really in the same league?

The majority of laws are enforced by moral suasion, not law enforcement officers. Most folks don't rob gas stations, or run red lights because: 1) It's part of living in a civil society; and 2) It gets expensive when you get caught.

We normally wouldn't advocate breaking the law, but the recreation fee program in the Sawtooth Forest is so egregiously bad that it deserves to be met with civil disobedience.

Don't buy a pass. Don't pay anything to settle a citation.

If you don't get cited, great. But if you do, give us a call. We'd like to hear your story, and we'd love to tell it to others.

We doubt that anyone will ever go on trial. The public image of Sawtooth Forest officials, as well as federal prosecutors, can't afford another black eye.

Idaho's congressional delegation should put an end to this demonstration fee program.

Idaho Mountain Express 1/12/2000

FOREST FEE PROGRAM FAILS BOOKEEPING 101

The Forest Service's fee demonstration program just failed Bookkeeping 101. The congressionally mandated pay-to-play program that began in 1997 imposes a fee on hikers, bikers, back-country skiers and other non- commercial users of public forest lands.

This week U.S. Attorney Betty Richardson told the Forest Service her office would not prosecute people ticketed for not paying the fee because prosecutions cost "too much."

She charged that the Forest Service had shifted the cost of prosecutions to her office without her agreement. Such prosecutions-similar to enforcement of parking tickets-have never been part of her budget.

A deputy U.S. attorney in Richardson's office called the fees "unfair" because the Forest Service did not create a system that can ensure every user pays.

The U.S. attorneys drove home points raised early on in public hearings. Apparently, no one listened.

When the one and only hearing on the controversial forest fees was held in Ketchum in 1998, one of the first questions asked was, "How much will fee collection and enforcement cost?"

A surprised public listened as a Forest Service spokesman said the Forest Service had done no cost projections on collection, enforcement or prosecution.

Members of the public speculated that the fees collected would not be enough to cover the costs of the program, let alone fund forest improvements. They urged forest officials and U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, who was at the hearing through the magic of a speakerphone, to do the simple arithmetic.

They didn't.

Forest Service personnel who would never think of going on a long wilderness trip without a map, went ahead and undertook the congressionally mandated fee pilot program without charting a path. The Forest Service left Richardson to shoulder her new work load alone, while it merrily spent its newly found "free money" on trail maintenance and new outhouses.

Now, forest officials are scurrying to "solve the problem" by meeting with Richardson.

Richardson should quickly calculate what it will cost her office to prosecute non-payers. She should give the Forest Service a bill along with an estimate for future services.

It's a good bet the bill, along with the cost of toll booths and fee stations that might make the system fair, will exceed the $260,000 in fees collected since 1997 when the program began.

With bill in hand, the Forest Service should declare the fee program a failure, go back to Congress, and get its funding from the proper place-from federal income tax revenues.

Copyright © 2000 Express Publishing Inc.