Rec Groups Seek to Modify Fee Demo

Chairman Scott McInnis

Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health

1337 Longworth House Office Building
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515-6205
(202) 225-0691
(202) 225-0521 (fax)

Dale Bosworth, Chief

USDA Forest Service

P.O. Box 96090

202-205-1661

202-205-1765 (fax)

Washington, DC 20090 March 20, 2002

Dear Chairman McInnis and Chief Bosworth,

Thank you both for taking a personal and professional interest in the future of Rec Fee Demo.

We, the undersigned, human-powered recreation organizations have followed this demonstration project since its inception in 1996. We have at times been supportive and at other times troubled by the implementation of this program. However, we have always had the best interests of the public and the agencies at heart.

Once again, we would like to thank Chairman McInnis for inviting American Whitewater's Access Director, Jason Robertson to testify to the House Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health in September 2001. As Mr. Robertson testified, the recreation community would support certain user fees if there is a firm commitment from Congress to provide adequate public land funding via appropriations with an emphasis on restoration and maintenance for recreation purposes.

We also want you both to know that there is broad public interest in the recommendations for modifying Rec Fee Demo that the Chairman made in his January 25, 2002 letter to Chief Bosworth.

Our coalition agrees with Chairman McInnis' assertion that a limited fee collection program can be an effective means of generating direly needed financial resources to offset the growing stresses and strains associated with increased recreational-use on our national forests. A user-pays program such as Rec Fee Demo is supportable to the extent that fees are limited to use for maintenance and essential site improvements that directly benefit the recreation users. Within this framework, the top priority for all user fees should be utilizing locally collected fees for local recreation maintenance projects.

Further, the human powered recreation community is in broad agreement with the nine Fee Demo principles that Chairman McInnis set forth. These principles represent a solid step up the ladder towards making the Forest Service fee program more effective, responsive and user friendly, and bringing this debate about fees to a sensible and agreeable resolution.

As you know, America's national forests are viewed as "freedom places" where people can go to enjoy any number of wonderful activities in a natural environment. In many ways, fees represent a break from this view, and it is important to ensure that any fee system is as non-intrusive on visitor experiences and opportunities as possible.

Before discussing Chairman McInnis' recommendations further, we would like to express our broadest reflections about forest fees:

• User fee implementation and collection has been an unpopular inconvenience. The public's frustration regarding fee programs justifies strict controls on how the fees are collected and managed. If fees continue to be authorized, they should be limited in scope and application.
• User fees represent a double jeopardy for taxpayers visiting public lands.
• Many diverse interests have expressed concerns about the program, yet there is little unified direction for the future of the program within Congress, the agency, or the public. The agency is driving these fees without a public mandate of support and approval.
• Fees should only be used for maintenance and essential site improvements directly benefiting users; and projects should only be initiated when local users agree that improvements are needed.
• Fees should only be permitted if the agency can justify a specific list of needs upfront, rather than general needs as it is being applied now. The agency should base all projects on a specific list of needs that explicitly details the backlogged maintenance items which will be addressed by fee projects.
• Maintaining local recreation needs must be the top priority for all user fee sites.
• The agencies should limit spending on new fee collection experiments.
• It is time for a comprehensive standardization of policies and rules for collecting fees and reporting on expenses.
• The Forest Service is already experiencing self-induced funding offsets as the agency comes to rely more and more heavily on fees. This trend is likely to continue unless there is a strict accounting of the real first and second order costs associated with the fee program.
• The agency needs to develop a standard comprehensive report from each fee site detailing the fee program's effectiveness. Our groups have made multiple individual and collective efforts to gather data from the Forest Service at the Headquarters, Region and District levels regarding implementation, application, collection and use of fees. These efforts were largely ineffective due to the fact that there is no standardized report.
• Rather than emphasizing fee collection to perform maintenance, the agencies should rely on increased volunteerism to assist with these duties. The agencies should advocate for a program that directly supports President Bush's USA Freedom Corps and his personal call to service for Americans. Consistent with our recommendation, the President has asked for a complete inventory of the service opportunities in the Forest Service, including a description of the extent to which the agency makes the public aware of those opportunities; and a complete inventory of regulatory and programmatic barriers to service including recommendations for modifying or repealing barriers to enhance those opportunities.

Responding to the Chairman's Letter

Our organizations have carefully reviewed Chairman McInnis' principles on a point-by-point basis, and have highlighted particular areas of interest. We have also included several recommendations clarifying our interest in how the program could be improved.

The two most substantial modifications we have recommended are fundamentally requiring a strong volunteer service component to Fee Demo, and creating Fee Demo project review committees at the Forest District level to recommend plans for using and collecting fees.

1. Retain Fees on Site: Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo must continue to require that user fee revenue stay substantially on the site where it is collected. 100% of the revenue should remain within the Forest Region from which it was collected. Of this, 80% of revenue should continue to be reinvested in the Forest Districts and sites where it is collected.
   1. Excess moneys generated on high-revenue sites should be narrowly and exclusively dedicated to recreation-related maintenance needs in the Forest Service Region where the revenues are collected. As Chairman McInnis recognized, this ensures that excess revenue derived from the most productive collection stations are spent on the ground in the general area from which they were collected, while avoiding a situation in which high-dollar collection sites are forced to spend revenues beyond their needs.

i. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should also include directives or triggers for reducing fees over time at sites that regularly generate more revenue than is needed on site.

1. 2. Consideration should be given to allowing the return of all fees collected from existing recreation-oriented outfitter concessions, such as rafting or horse packing, to the Forest District from which they were collected or on which their permitted activities occur. This would have the effect of providing some increased revenue at the local level to mitigate impacts from these recreation users. However, care should be taken to ensure that if this source of fees is permitted, that it does not inadvertently drive the agency to approve more outfitter uses on public lands, thereby driving out the capable and self-guided public. However, if language explicitly limits this collection practice to currently permitted operations, then that concern could be addressed to a large degree.
   3. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should express Congress' intention that the use of the fees must substantively benefit the recreation user groups from which the fees were collected. This would remedy situations such as the one on the Nantahala River in North Carolina where the Forest Service levies fees on boaters, but does little to levy fees against other forest users, resulting in a situation in which the boating community perceives that they are subsidizing other forest use.
2. Limit Use & Costs: Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should limit revenue from Fee Demo to use on projects and services that have direct visitor benefits. Long-term authorization should also require that expenditures on administrative overhead and personnel should be tightly monitored and limited in scope. Self-perpetuation of the user fee program for the sake of nothing other than the program should be prohibited. Recreation user-fees should be reinvested in a manner that directly and measurably benefits the user public. Consistent with the founding purposes of Fee Demo, it is recognized that visitors have impacts, that heavy recreational use creates corresponding pressures on the land and the recreational infrastructure that supports high use sites. As such, visitors at these high use sites may arguably bear an additional, modest expense in mitigating these pressures.
   1. Allowable Uses: Long-term extension of the program should direct that revenues be principally spent in a manner that supports and enhances the recreational experience of the user public.

i. Including: expenditures on maintenance of recreational roads and trails; construction and maintenance of restrooms, visitor facilities, boat ramps, interpretive sites, campgrounds and other recreation related infrastructure; resource protection and preservation.

ii. Excluding: the squandering of scarce financial resources on administrative overhead or excessive personnel. Fee revenues are intended for use at project-specific recreation facilities and may not be used for routine administrative operations, to cover on-going or annual operating costs, such as: development of management plans and planning documents, staffing, costs of general administration, research, permitting, or law enforcement.

2. 2. Allocation & Accountability: Chairman McInnis has wisely recommended establishing criteria and benchmarks for the allocation of user fee revenues as part of a long-term extension of the program and requiring that a minimum of 75% of all revenues staying on site be reinvested in recreational infrastructure and other services that directly benefit the user public, leaving a maximum 25% of on-site receipts to offset incidental expenses associated with the administration of the program and overhead. We recommend taking that one step further and requiring the Agency to terminate any liability fee collection programs that:

i. In the second year following implementation, fails to yield gross receipts exceeding the total overhead costs of implementing, enforcing, and administering the fee collection program by 50%; and

ii. In the third year fails to yield gross receipts exceeding the total overhead costs of enforcing and administering the fee collection program by 75%; and

iii. In the fifth year and every year thereafter fails to yield gross receipts exceeding the total overhead costs of enforcing and administering the fee collection program by 87.5%.

2. 3. Prior to implementing any fee collection program, require each participating Forest District to draft a business plan identifying the specific projects and management objectives for which the fees will be used, and how fees will be collected. Then require the agency to openly specify and report on the maintenance projects, other uses, and associated costs of the fee demo project at each fee collection site.
3. Limit Fees to High Use & High Impact Areas: Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should not allow fees to be levied in undeveloped, primitive, or backcountry areas where there are unlikely to be substantial infrastructure related expenses. The corollary is that fees should only be levied in high use and high impact areas. As Chairman McInnis observed, if a recreation activity in a given area, such as dropping a kayak in the river or hiking in the backcountry, results in only modest expenses to the Forest Service, there is no compelling reason, consistent with the purposes of the user fee program, to levy an access or use charge. Another way of looking at this is that fees should only be used at sites and facilities offering enhanced visitor services, where visitors can observe a direct return on their investment beyond their normal expectations as taxpayers.
   1. Limiting user fee authority to more developed, infrastructure intensive sites comes with the added value of obviating the concern that long-term user fee authority might lead to the commercial exploitation of pristine lands. However, this protection is lost unless the number and scope of sites in which the fees are collected is limited as detailed in item #6 (below).
   2. Long-term authorizations should explicitly bar fees from being used to construct or develop new facilities. Construction of new facilities will require additional maintenance and funding. Unless that infrastructure funding is forthcoming from the federal appropriations process, the agency will have to impose permanent fees for visitors, which goes against the principle behind Fee Demo of fundamentally addressing the agency's backlogged maintenance needs.
   3. We share the agency's difficulty in defining dispersed recreation. One suggestion is to develop or use a standard for determining high use or high impact areas in the context of the Recreational Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) or by the existence of hardened facilities such as bathrooms, visitor centers, parking areas, or boat launch ramps. Given the dispersed opportunities for access at most Forest Service sites, high use should be gauged by the number of users, rather than the number of access points.
   4. If fee collection sites are allowed willy-nilly across the country in all forests, then that will have the likely effect of driving use to no-fee or low-fee areas. This phenomenon is real, and has been evidenced recently in California State Park's fee experience. Thus, if fees are charged everywhere except the backcountry, then that would likely ramp up use pressures on these sites, which is an unacceptable outcome of any fee program to both our groups and broader conservation interests.
4. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should deter the Forest Service from appearing to nickel-and-dime visitors. Authorization should limit recreation sites to collecting one fee and one fee only from individual visitors.
   1. Legislation should provide guidance to the agency regarding when it is, and is not, appropriate to charge intra-Forest fees or fees in areas that border state recreation areas that already charge fees. This may necessitate limited fee-sharing language for cooperative partnerships with state land management agencies, and cost sharing provisions for Forest Regions that share borders.
5. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should explicitly bar user fees from being applied as a management tool for deterring use. Using fees to deter use is an entirely inappropriate application of the spirit of the Fee Demo program, which is designed to mitigate visitor impacts at high use sites by asking taxpayers to contribute a little more to help at the sites that are important to them with the backlogged maintenance.
   1. The only acceptable exception is that fees might be used in narrowly defined circumstances to control incidents of widespread degenerative behavior.
6. We very much agree with the Chairman that long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should require that the number of fee collection sites be narrowly defined and limited. The Forest Service should not have unchecked authority to collect fees on every campground, trail and scenic overlook on every national forest in the nation. The onus is on the Forest Service to demonstrate that it needs more than the 100 fee sites originally authorized by Congress.
   1. This could be achieved by only allowing fees to be levied at facilities with toilets, running potable water, electric hook-ups, paved parking areas, hardened campgrounds, or motor vehicle boat launch ramps.
   2. The current authority allows everything from multi-state passes to individual isolated parking lots to qualify as Rec Fee Demo Projects. Any limitation on the number of sites, should also narrow and define the allowable scope of what constitutes a single Rec Fee Project.
   3. The agency should be required to narrowly detail, up-front at the District level where fees are collected, the specific funding and maintenance needs of each site and proposed fee program before being authorized to implement any fee collection projects.
7. Curtail Experimentation: Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should continue to require the Forest Service to be innovative and monitor the program on an on-going basis. The Forest Service should continue to test, monitor and innovate in all phases of the user fee program. However, the agency should limit spending on new fee collection experiments. The Forest Service has created dozens of different programs and has a good idea of what does and does not work. It is time to put the brakes on further widespread experimentation. The experiments are becoming de facto permanent programs, due to the substantial infrastructure costs associated with implementing the program. This means that fee payers and taxpayers will wind up spending a lot of money to change the way the programs look in specific areas if the program is reauthorized and fee collecting norms are established.
8. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should explicitly promote community outreach, volunteerism, and partnerships.
   1. Chairman McInnis hit the nail on the head when he explained that the Forest Service must aggressively court public input and involvement in all phases, including the selection, development and implementation of user fee sites. As decisions regarding user fees are made, the user public and the public at-large should be full partners in the decision-making process. Moreover, the Forest Service must focus on doing a better job communicating the improvements and benefits the user public realizes from user fees, whether through signage or other means of communication. This would go a long way in clearing up misconceptions and generating community support for the program.
   2. Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should require every Forest Region, and preferably Forest District, to employ a Volunteer Coordinator.

In 2001, the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest reported that the agency coordinated 20,000 volunteer hours on the forest. In this system, volunteers work 2 days (8:30am to 4pm), and earn a season pass. If you work one day, you earn a one day pass. But, two people working together, such as a husband and wife, could cash in their one-day passes for a season pass. This system gets a lot of people out working on the trails, and has been favorably described as HOV lane volunteerism.

Agreements with the Washington Trails Association, Northwest Youth Corps, Mountains to Sound Greenway/EarthCorps, Pacific Northwest Trail Association, and the Student Conservation Association resulted in a total volunteer and partnership value of work on the Forest of $614,000. Forest employees coordinated volunteer maintenance work with about two dozen different groups across the Forest for an additional 20,000 volunteer hours. This work is valued at about $240,000.

i. The Coordinator's performance appraisal should be tied directly to the amount of volunteerism recorded within their Forest Region.

ii. The Coordinator should not be responsible for the fee sites and levying fees; their sole responsibility should be volunteer coordination.

iii. Each Forest Region should be required to document a minimum of 30,000 volunteer man-hours annually in order to be eligible to levy fees in the Region the following year. 30,000 man-hours is the approximate equivalent of 10 people working 8 hours daily throughout the year.

iv. Given that a strong volunteer force would have a huge positive impact on the Forest Service maintenance backlog, visitors who volunteer more than 14 hours should have all fees waived within the Forest Region for one year. Likewise, volunteers should not be charged any fees on the days that they volunteer a minimum of two hours.

v. Volunteering provides a unique opportunity for low, medium, and high income families to access public lands, and directly and measurably supports President Bush's personal call to service.

vi. Allow the volunteer coordinator's salary and overhead to be paid from the maximum 20% of revenue available to the Forest Region under point #1 in this letter.

8. 3. Require each Forest District in which fees are levied to establish a Fee Demo project review committee, consisting at a minimum of (1) the proposed volunteer coordinator, a (2) concession outfitter, the (3) Regional Supervisor or appointee, a (4) regular volunteer, a (5) non-profit representing recreation interests.
9. Sunset Provisions: Long-term authorization of Rec Fee Demo should require that the Forest Service fee authority sunset automatically every 5-years, giving Congress and the interested public an opportunity to reassess and, as needed, modify the program in the future. Chairman McInnis' sunset proposal would give the program greater permanence than it enjoys under its present demonstration status, and will ensure that an interested and engaged user public has a meaningful opportunity to shape and modify the user fee program through the legislative process as needed in the future.
   1. In addition, the agencies should be required to establish sunset dates for fee demo projects that are for specific one-time maintenance applications.

Finally, in regard to the Chairman's letter, we would like to be invited to speak to the Committee on Forests and Forest Health at greater length about these and other funding issues for the Forest Service.

Responding to Communications with the Forest Service

In addition to reviewing the Chairman's recommendations, we would like to address a few items that are being considered by the Forest Service as alternatives to the current Fee Demo authority:

1. The agency is considering levying vehicle oriented fees at the Forest Region level via daily or annual vehicle passes, meaning that fees would only be levied at vehicle accessible places such as parking areas, trailheads, boat ramp launches, and visitor centers. This is of moderate concern since it could lead some critics to question whether the agency is about to go on a construction spree to make more sites eligible for fee collection. This concept is troubling, and reveals the social value of Chairman McInnis' sixth principle, as discussed above, since this principle requires a limit on the number of sites that the fees can be used. The agency would have to be careful to define its motives for a vehicle-oriented fee, careful to explain that it is a maintenance fee rather than an access fee, and careful to explain what it's construction expectations are.

There is also talk of having statewide passes allowing reciprocal sharing between neighboring Forest Regions and Districts. This means that there could be as many as 155 Forest passes, and multiple regional or national passes.

1. 1. This sounds similar to the management model for Great Falls National Park near Washington, DC. Without necessarily advocating for this type of system, we suggest that a careful review of the fee collection practices at the Great Falls site could provide a model for the Forest Service. One element that is of particular interest to us is that the Park only charges fees at certain points. Use is moderately limited at the non-fee areas such as the Angler's Inn Parking Lot by limited parking, limited visitor facilities, and limited scenic vistas. Whereas use is promoted by signage, developed facilities, and scenic attractions at the main parking lots where fees are charged. In this case visitors have an annual pass allowing them free entrance at the guarded gate at Great Falls proper, or may simply park for free downriver and across the street from Angler's Inn.
   2. The Forest Service implemented one Rec Fee Demo policy on Georgia and South Carolina's Chattooga River that the agency would be well advised to consider. The agency chose to issue two vehicle passes per visitor purchasing an annual pass. In this case, the District Ranger recognized that that most visitors desiring annual parking passes had multiple vehicles that they would use on multiple visits to the site. While there may have been some very minor abuse of the system, that element was particularly well received by the regular visitors and was widely lauded as a good idea and a good public relations move.
   3. There has been discussion of a national forest pass. Such a pass would be convenient; however, implementing this type of pass would be a throwing in of the towel. If such a pass is implemented, it will take the fee program out of the realm of addressing local needs and into the realm of simply collecting fees to increase revenue for the Forest Service. One is designed to addressed local community needs, and one is designed to fundamentally offset federal appropriations from the taxpaying public.
2. Rec Fee Demo has been in operation now for more than 5 years, it is time to develop a national policy regarding reasonable costs of collection, selecting eligible maintenance projects, and soliciting public input on individual fee projects.
3. The agency could use its meaningful measures policy to document whether Rec Fee Demo is successfully bringing deferred maintenance to standard. However, such a gauge would only be successful if the agency can identify the current maintenance needs on a specific project-by-project basis.
4. The various reporting and accounting methods for monitoring the Rec Fee Demo income and expenses appear fuzzy. We've recently seen through Enron how funny accounting can result in misleading calculations of value and cost. As a result we recommend monitoring all direct costs associated with managing and administering Fee Demo, including the direct labor and cost pool overhead for fee demo, as well as the direct expense of all maintenance projects and other direct use of fees.
5. We would like to be invited to select a representative from our human-powered recreation coalition to participate in the Forest Service's Rec Fee Council led by Mr. Tom Thompson.

In closing, we would like to share a story from an American Whitewater board member that details some of the problems with Fee Demo:

Last summer on a Middle Fork rafting trip I arrived a day early and wanted to go for a run in the forest near Stanley, Idaho. I drove to a trailhead, saw Rec Fee Demo signs but no local collection place for a day pass (much less a 45-minute pass), went for a run, got a ticket. A kindly ranger said: there was no trailhead collection point, you could only pay in town and the only option was a multi-day pass ($15 I recall). When I pointed out I had only gone running for 45-minutes, would be on the Middle Fork the next day (where I was paying yet another Rec Fee Demo fee), he didn't seem to get the point. Bottom line: I was not happy with the way they implemented the Rec Fee Demo or the limited options it gave me -- $15 for a 45 minute run? I do not think so.

Thank you for your consideration of these recommendations. We look forward to working with Congress and the Forest Service in securing the essential funding required by the agency to protect the resource and promote recreation.

Sincerely,

Jason D. Robertson, Access Director

American Whitewater

Dave Jenkins, Director of Conservation and Public Policy

American Canoe Association

Jason Keith, National Policy Analyst

The Access Fund

Lloyd Athearn, Deputy Director

The American Alpine Club

Jennifer Lamb, Public Policy Director

National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS)