No Parks for the Poor – In the face of budget cuts, some land management agencies are ramping up user fees — and betraying the egalitarian promise of public lands.

Liv­ingston, Mont. — A while back I was loaf­ing around a camp­fire with a group of friends and strangers on the bank of one of this state’s famous­ly beau­ti­ful rivers when the con­ver­sa­tion turned to the over­crowd­ing prob­lems on anoth­er of this state’s famous­ly beau­ti­ful rivers.

“Is it too much to ask that we pay a small fee to use the pub­lic access sites on the riv­er?” offered a well-mean­ing and com­fort­ably wealthy retiree. ​“I sure wouldn’t mind.”

Well, I do mind, and I think a lot of oth­er peo­ple do mind, too.

Under­stand that it’s not because I’m against con­ser­va­tion, or because I believe in human use of land above all else. In some cas­es I sup­port restrict­ing access to pub­lic land if it’s cru­cial to pro­tect­ing wildlife habi­tat. What I’m against is con­ser­va­tion or facil­i­ty main­te­nance that depends on weed­ing out the poor.

The Custer Gal­latin Nation­al For­est, which spans from Mon­tana to South Dako­ta and con­tains most of the wild lands that make up the Greater Yel­low­stone Ecosys­tem, recent­ly pro­posed to ramp up the fees at camp­grounds, rental cab­ins and oth­er sites. In many cas­es, the agency plans to more than dou­ble the price. Fees at sev­er­al of my favorite camp­grounds would go from $5 a night to $12, while the cost of two of my favorite cab­ins, cur­rent­ly $25 and $30 per night, would rise to $75 per night. The pro­pos­al would also impose fees of $10 per night at four camp­grounds where now there are none. And in this case, the agency has no such high-mind­ed goal as pro­tect­ing habitat.

The Custer Gal­latin fee hike pro­pos­al is not an out­lier but part of a gen­er­al shift in how we fund fed­er­al pub­lic lands in this coun­try. In 2005, the Fed­er­al Lands Recre­ation Enhance­ment Act gave fed­er­al land man­age­ment agen­cies across the coun­try increased pow­er to impose and retain user fees — and, accord­ing to a report by the Col­orado-based West­ern Slope No-Fee Coali­tion, dra­mat­i­cal­ly ​“changed the focus of land agen­cies: From resource man­age­ment and pub­lic ser­vice to rev­enue gen­er­a­tion. From view­ing the vis­it­ing pub­lic as own­ers to treat­ing them as cus­tomers. From being stew­ards of resources owned by all Amer­i­cans to treat­ing the lands they man­age as agency property.”

The report goes on: ​“By allow­ing local recre­ation man­agers to raise their own oper­at­ing bud­gets, fee reten­tion … has dimin­ished Congress’s over­sight of agency spend­ing, and has almost elim­i­nat­ed the role of the pub­lic as the own­ers of pub­lic lands.”

Custer Gal­latin For­est Super­vi­sor Mary Erick­son explained the agency’s rea­son­ing behind the pro­posed fee increase in a press release: Most of the Forest’s fees haven’t increased in the last 20 years, and though ​“it means more than dou­bling some of our cur­rent fees,” the pro­posed increase ​“will allow us to con­tin­ue to pro­vide high qual­i­ty recre­ation expe­ri­ences.” Jane Ruch­man, the For­est Ser­vice con­tact per­son for the pro­pos­al, told the Boze­man Dai­ly Chron­i­cle that the fee increase will, in the newspaper’s words, ​“make the price for For­est Ser­vice accom­mo­da­tions more com­pa­ra­ble to offer­ings at pri­vate camp­grounds or hotels.”

To Erick­son I ask this: Do you know what else hasn’t increased much in the last 20 years? Real wages, espe­cial­ly for low-wage work­ers. And to Ruch­man, I’d like to point out that unlike the own­ers of pri­vate camp­grounds and hotels, which run them for prof­it, the For­est Service’s role is to man­age the lands we own in com­mon for the ben­e­fit of all of us com­mon­ers. That the agency finds the price of pri­vate hotels in this rapid­ly gen­tri­fy­ing area rel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion shows either a mis­un­der­stand­ing or a betray­al of that role.

I’ve lived and passed through oth­er places in this coun­try where, when you pull into a pub­lic camp­ground, you expect to stuff $25 or $35 into that rav­en­ous green fee enve­lope. Besides my self­ish, local inter­est in being able to spend prac­ti­cal­ly half my sum­mers liv­ing at the camp­ground up the West Boul­der Riv­er, I also think non-local peo­ple shouldn’t have to be rich to take a road trip to Yel­low­stone. I love the idea that a fam­i­ly any­where in this coun­try could pack into their car and spend a week around Yel­low­stone for no more than the cost of gas, food and $35 for a camp­site with all the lux­u­ries of the Four P’s: pit toi­let, pic­nic table, fire pit, and water pump. If there’s any egal­i­tar­i­an spir­it left in this country’s insti­tu­tions — and clear­ly there isn’t much — it’s embod­ied in that idea.

In the idea, I said. The real­i­ty, of course, is dif­fer­ent. In real­i­ty, access to America’s pub­lic lands, like so much else, is not dis­trib­uted equal­ly. Accord­ing to a 2018 For­est Ser­vice study, ​“Recre­ation Equi­ty: Is the For­est Ser­vice Serv­ing Its Diverse Publics?,” the authors found that while Black peo­ple make up 13% of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion, they account for just 1% of Nation­al For­est vis­its. Lati­nos, who make up 17% of the pop­u­la­tion, account for just 6% of vis­its. Native Amer­i­cans, from whom the lands that became the Nation­al Forests were stolen in the first place, are also under­rep­re­sent­ed. One of the rea­sons for this inequity, the authors write, is that minor­i­ty pop­u­la­tions tend to be con­cen­trat­ed in urban com­mu­ni­ties, geo­graph­i­cal­ly iso­lat­ed from Nation­al Forests. How­ev­er, the authors write, ​“This iso­la­tion and indi­rect mar­gin­al­iza­tion from Nation­al For­est Sys­tem lands is also often com­pound­ed by eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ties that make access to these areas even more difficult.”

We must do many things to make pub­lic lands more acces­si­ble and wel­com­ing to all. Increas­ing fees, and so the cost of vis­it­ing, is not one of them. 

I am sym­pa­thet­ic to the For­est Service’s need for fund­ing. Despite ris­ing vis­i­ta­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, the 2021 fed­er­al bud­get pro­pos­es sweep­ing cuts to the For­est Ser­vice, includ­ing the elim­i­na­tion of the Recre­ation Research pro­gram, a $2.1 mil­lion cut to trail funds, and a $4.1 mil­lion decrease in recre­ation, her­itage and wilder­ness fund­ing, accord­ing to the Billings Gazette.

In the face of those cuts, the Custer Gal­latin Nation­al For­est would lean more heav­i­ly on user fees, 95% of which are retained by the For­est, which ​“has worked hard over the years to rein­vest rev­enue into main­te­nance, oper­a­tions, improve­ment, and resource pro­tec­tion,” accord­ing to the agency press release.

The ques­tion before us, how­ev­er, is not whether to fund For­est Ser­vice oper­a­tions, but how to fund them. Clear­ly, the For­est Ser­vice needs fund­ing. But it should be appro­pri­at­ed in the fed­er­al bud­get, not foist­ed onto For­est-users in the form of increased fees.