Say good-bye to your $50 National Park pass or the Golden Eagle for $65.00. The NPS is starting a new inter-agency program pass for get this..........$80.00 annually.

If you're old or disabled, you get a break on the fee. For the rest of us, tough luck! Read it and weep.

http://home.nps.gov/applications/morningreport/

~Susan

For what it's worth, the National Park Service is grossly underfunded. I don't mind shelling out a little more annually to help support Federal lands. One could argue that we already pay for access via taxes, but look where the taxes are going: Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

The National Parks Pass at $50 has been a screamingly good deal. My pass has more than paid for itself each year I've had one. I'm sure the $80 interagency pass will also pay for itself over the course of a year. If that is not the case for an individual, why buy the pass?

"The officials noted that 100 percent of the revenue derived from passes sold at federal recreation sites will directly benefit the selling agency and no less than 80 percent of the revenue will remain at the site where the pass was sold."

Just like the infamous Adventure Pass (that for some reason people are still displaying in their cars)???

I have been willing to pay for various kinds of access passes to places, but I have been known to whine for several reasons. First, if I bought all the passes to places that I go in a year it would include many different areas (county parks pass, state parks pass, national parks pass, national forest area passes, etc.). This complaint isn't really relevant other than the interagenceny pass reduces the number of categories (but then forces you to get annual passes to them too). Second, the money doesn't seem to go to what I care about (it's all about me, didn't you know?). I really don't care for a huge new visitor center, really long paved walkways, or new trucks for ranger duties that only involved driving on good roads and don't require hauling anything.

Rumor has it that it will include all BLM and Forest Service Fee Areas. In Colorado, the current situation requires purchasing a Golden Eagle pass for Dept of the Interior (NPS, USFWS, BLM) fee areas, and a separate pass from one of the Forest Service's many consessionaires for Forest Service Fee Areas. (Around here, that is either Rocky Mountain Recreation or Canyon Enterprises.) Additionally, you have to have a Colorado State Parks Pass ($55) and a valid Habitat Stamp ($10) to access State Wildlife areas. Top that with a Pikes Peak Annual Pass ($100), State Fishing license ($25.25), sailboat permit ($15.25), workboat permit ($15.25) and city lake permit ($25), and I figure I'm spending nearly $350 a year to buy a half dozen passes from different public and private entities just so I may legally access MY PUBLIC LANDS that I already pay federal and state taxes to manage. If this new permit simplifies this process at all, then $80 may actually be a "decrease" in the total fees paid in that I will no longer be beholden to the local FS concessionaires. I've got a friend at the FS looking into whether this will be the case. I'll post whatever I find here.

I purchase two passes annually. One for each vehicle as sometimes we are at two different places during the same time frame. We like the convenience of two passes and the cost has been reasonable.

Car 1 = annual pass to J-Tree which used to be $20 but now runs $30 a year.

Car 2 = annual Golden Eagle pass for $65 allowing access to all Parks and many other areas like Red Rocks or Tahquitz.

Until now I also felt that the price was right. Pete's example of how fees rack up will make this inter-agency pass a great deal. For me, it's just a price increase as I don't personally run into many of the fees Pete sites. In my case it will run me an additional $1.25 a month, No big deal and if I can launch our boat with it even better!

I guess what I question is why get rid of the old standard National Park Pass for $50.00. People who require the inter-agency super pass could buy one but the average Joe would still have access to the standard pass.

~Susan

I don't get/undertand how this is a better deal. By Inter-Agency, I assume at the Federal level - NPS, USFS, BLM, Natl Monument, other Fed Wilderness (are there any??).

{Clarification -- The new pass covers recreation opportunities on public lands managed by four Department of the Interior agencies – the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and the Bureau of Reclamation, and by the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service.}


How is this a benefit other than to me entering the NPS? Will the USFS see more funding from this to actually do some good in conservation?

We won't see this as a pass into State & Local parks & wilderness areas.

Basically, I don't see this as anything more than raising the fee; so I effectively pay more for being able to use less.

Not to mention all the other dues & fees I pay to non-profit & charitable conservation organizations over the year to advocate access to public areas. Ugh - I bet it's more like $1k-$2k per year to be able to go outside and not get arrested.

And then there's climbing & bivy permits; not free in some parts.


Pete - Don't forget your second rod stamp so you don't get hassled switching out lines. Even though I'm not breaking the law by having two poles, My dad & I still get the f'n third degree sometimes because they sit across the way and don't have a good visual, then they run right up to try and bully their inaccurate perspective of the law. I wish they would bring us in front of the judge, maybe the bench could educate them.

Then, also, I go through all kinds of education for Leave No Trace, so my passage is as lightly impacted as it possibly can be; not to mention, I pick up all kinds of crap tossed around in my friggin forest.

What they ought to do is deputize climbers to enforce policy on these jackass flatlanders.

Thanks, Doug.

"Some specific examples of projects funded with fee revenues include: rehabilitating the Yellowstone National Park Canyon Visitor Center and creating new exhibits at Yellowstone National Park, enhancing boat launch facilities on the Tonto National Forest in Arizona, building an accessible boardwalk at Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in Wyoming, and improving the museum at Desoto National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa"


Most of which looks to me like a slush-fund redevelopment fee for Yellowstone & (probably a smaller portion) to the Desoto museum, the other items are not that significant in cost and don't really address erosive & fire control/mitigation measures necessary for the USFS.

So, engage me; what point am I not getting?
(ps not trying to be a jerk, just asking for some viable answers to restricting access to my federal lands.)

It was $50 and now it's $80, it's a slippery slope. I just wrote a paper on this, here is some of it.


America started down this path about 25 years ago in the early 1980s, when congress started taking money out of the public lands budgets . As with everything in America the root of the problem is lack of money. Because of this, the public land agencies have not had enough money to maintain the public lands that they oversee. So public lands began to slip, there wasn’t enough money in their budget to pay for maintenance of roads, buildings, trails, signs, ect. To try to help compensate for this lack of funds and not wanting to replace it directly with the tax dollars that were taken away; congress passed the Recreational Access Tax (R.A.T.) as a, “last-minute rider to the 1997 federal appropriations bill, which allowed some national forests in the Northwest and Southern California to start pilot fee programs. [In 2005], with the passing of the Recreational Enhancement Act, again, as a late night, last-minute rider to an appropriations bill, the demonstration period was made permanent with plans to extend fees to all National Forests”(Kancler 1). R.A.T. allows the public lands agencies to charge money for users to access and enjoy their public lands. Now users that have been enjoying their favorite public lands free of charge for years are required to pay to enter.

The government is not looking at the effects on future generations when making decisions concerning public lands. “Loggers have cut more than 40 million acres of national forest, leaving behind only 5% of the native ‘old-growth’ trees” (Nurtured Nature 3). Lumber is needed in the world and if it is going to be used to build American homes it should come from the United States, but cutting down 95% of the “old - growth” forests in America is unacceptable. There are more sustainable ways to build, houses, straw bale, adobe, and brick to name a few. Another lack of foresight by the forest service when making decisions is that, “the expense of building roads for logging has often cost the Forest Service much more than timber sales have generated, and left a spider’s web of 445,000 miles of routes that have become a budget - busting maintenance nightmare” (Nurtured Nature 1). Building roads to log forests does not make money in the short run, and looses money in the long run. Not to mention the environmental impact of building roads, and logging. “Under President Bush…money has been shifted to fire suppression and extractive industries. Budget constraints have resulted in staff layoffs and closure of facilities” (Fee raises hackles of park users 2). Investing in fire suppression is shortsighted. It’s costly, has negative affects on the ecosystem, and is dangerous for fire fighters when a fire inevitably starts, to name a just a few of the negative affects of fire suppression. If this kind of decision making continues, America’s national forests will hardly resemble forests at all.

Public land agencies can’t be expected to perform effectively after their budgets are cut. Money is needed to keep parks running, and without that money services start to dwindle. “According to the Department of the Interior’s latest estimates, the deferred maintenance backlog for the Interior agencies participating in the [Recreational Access Tax] program ranges from $5.1 billion to $8.3 billion, with the Park Service alone accounting for an estimated $4 to $7 billion” (Hill 2). Even though passing R.A.T. gets more money to the parks, is not the answer to this problem. These public lands are America, and should be paid for by American taxes. Although some “visitors don’t mind paying the extra money” (Wood 1), the burden of maintaining these public lands should be spread out to all Americans. These public lands are for the good of the nation and should be supported likewise. All of the American public pays for the war in Iraq even though some don’t support it ; the same should happen for public lands. It’s ok if people decide not to visit these lands, but the option should be available to everyone. Paying $25 to enter a National Park is “still a bargain compared to what vacationers pay for a day at Disneyland or other major leisure destinations, but the Park Service's growing reliance on fees could eventually price some Americans out of their national parks” (Arrandale 823). No one should be denied access to their public lands. While families travel to both Disneyland and national parks for vacations, they are not in the same category and therefore should not be priced the same. Public lands are America’s wild lands that need to be protected, not treated like an amusement park. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “it is not what we have that will make us a great nation, it is the way in which we use it” (Marx 431). Roosevelt was the president that “first established the Forest Service in 1905” (Nurtured Nature 2), his words seem to have been forgotten over the years. America is not treating its public lands as if they were special; they are regarded as a resource to make money off of. At this time, Yosemite National Park more resembles a small city then a National Park; with traffic jams, grocery stores, gas stations, hotels, restaurants, and stores. America needs to shift it priorities.

Some people argue that if one person has to pay for public land use everyone should. “Well, lumberjacks and ranchers are Americans too but they don’t expect to use the public lands for free. Hikers and backpackers apparently think they should be different. Unwilling to pay their share, they ignore the fact that recreation affects federal lands as much as timber harvesting, mining, or grazing” (Decamping politics from public lands 1). I will not dispute the fact that recreational activities impact the land as much as extractive industries , but recreationalist shouldn’t pay for public land use. The problem with their argument is that they are profiting off of the land, which is totally different than going out and playing on it. When companies are using public lands for profit they should be required to pay hefty fees in an effort to try to repay the public for impacting the land.

These public lands are being neglected and need care if they are going to be preserved for future generations. This should be the concern of the entire American population, not just the users of the lands. The users of these lands are not just a few people either, “By 1998, park visits had reached nearly 300 million” (Cox 2). Although the Recreational Access Tax is giving more money to the parks which is helping them maintain facilities, this is not the answer to this problem. Public lands need to be funded by the public through their taxes.